The Scopes Trial

The Scopes Trial, aka the Monkey Trial, played out in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. It all stemmed from a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we
are going to talk about the Scopes Trial also known
as the Monkey Trial, so known as the Scopes Monkey Trial,

(00:26):
which played out in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of
I learned last night from a dear friend of mine
who grew up in Tennessee that they cover this in
Tennessee History class. Cool. So if you grew up in Tennessee,
or maybe if you've studied law, you might already know
a lot of these details. But a lot of what
most folks know in quotation marks about this trial really

(00:48):
comes from Inherit the Wind, which started as a play
in nineteen fifty five and was adapted into a film
in nineteen sixty. And even if you have never personally
seen Inherit the Wind, which was conceived more as an
allegory for McCarthy ism than an actual portrayal of the
Scopes Trial, it does not even use the same names
or location. A lot of conventional wisdom about the trial

(01:11):
and its personalities and how it played out really have
much deeper roots in inherent the wind than in actual history.
I won't out them by name, but I have a
friend who I mentioned yesterday that we were doing this,
and their reaction was, wait, is that one about slavery?
It's like, oh, no, not, so there's no shame in

(01:35):
having you know, blind spots in your historical knowledge tickled me.
And it's a very smart person, but we all have them,
those weird blind spots. Uh, and Tracey will now clear
it up, and that person will know all the things
about anything about slavery at all. No. So The State
of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was the United States

(01:57):
first major legal battle over the teaching of evolution. Charles
Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in
the Struggle for Life back in eighteen fifty nine, and
Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution. The basic
idea that species change and shift over time goes back

(02:17):
millennia in multiple cultures, but the book itself was hugely
influential and very controversial by the nineteen teens and twenties.
Though Darwin's writings were well established, they were generally accepted
in the field of biology, and as part of a
general trend of progressive educational reform, they also started to
be incorporated into school curricula. In the United States, teachers

(02:41):
were beginning to unionize and the National Education Association had
recommended that states try to align their standards for education nationally.
And with this overall trend in standardization, more and more
states were making science a mandatory school requirement, and more
and more science textbook were addressing evolution. For example, William

(03:03):
Hunter's A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, which was published
in nineteen fourteen, was the approved biology textbook in the
state of Tennessee in nineteen Like other civic biology texts
of the time, it framed biology in terms of its
practical applicability to other parts of life, like hygiene and
wellness and food safety. Hunter's book included evolution in chapter fourteen,

(03:28):
quote Division of labor, the various forms of Plants and animals,
and part of that chapter reads the great English scientists
Charles Darwin, from this and other evidence, explained the theory
of evolution. This is the belief that simple forms of
life on Earth slowly and gradually gave rise to those
more complex, and that thus ultimately the most complex forms

(03:50):
came into existence. Running parallel to this progressive shift and
educational standards and the inclusion of evolution in science textbook
was a rise in religious fundamentalism, particularly Christian fundamentalism. The
term fundamentalism itself was coined in the nineteen twenties, signifying

(04:11):
a strict adherence to certain fundamental concepts of Christian faith
and in some cases interpreting the Bible literally rather than figuratively.
And when it came to evolutionary theory, some Christians, particularly
fundamentalist Christians, objected to the idea that humans came from
monkeys and to the idea that something other than a

(04:31):
divine hand could be credited for life on earth. And
if the Bible was the literal word of God, then
the writings of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary biologists were
directly contradictory to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. Obviously,
other religions and other nations had their own views on
evolution and whether it should be taught, but Christianity in

(04:53):
the United States is what is relevant to the Scopes trial.
Also for the sake of clarity. This whole human came
from monkey's idea. It's one that a lot of people
took away from the Origin of species and from all
the conversations that followed its publication. But the Origin of
Species only very briefly and vaguely alludes to the origins

(05:14):
of humankind. There is nothing in its saying humans came
from monkeys. Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man, came
out in eighteen seventy one, and it is about theories
of human origins, and it's basic conclusion is that quote
man is descended from some less highly organized form. Darwin
describes the less organized form as some ancient, unknown ancestor

(05:37):
that does have some monkey like traits, but it is
not a modern monkey. Today, the scientific consensus is that
both humans and monkeys descended from an ancestor that lived
millions of years ago, not that one came from another.
Essentially two branches of a tree, yes, a very large
and very complex tree. Yes, yes, yes, it's not like

(05:57):
they each branch off from one spot. It's there. Yeah.
We talked about this in our Pilled Down Man episode.
If you are looking for a little more of that
piece of history. So in the face of this ongoing
conflict between scientific acceptance of evolution and religious rejection of it,

(06:18):
multiple states began considering laws to ban its teaching. On
its face, this was a religious issue. The idea that
children might go to school and come home questioning their
faith was frightening and infuriating too many parents, especially given
that public schools were funded through taxes they were paying.
People were basically like, I want my kid to go

(06:40):
to the school I'm paying for and then come home
and say they don't believe in God anymore. But it
was also a general resistance to the overall trend of
establishing state and national education standards. Many parents in rural
counties didn't like the idea of far away legislatures in
their state capitals or Washington, d c. Setting rules about
what they're children would learn while having no idea what

(07:02):
their wishes or needs were. Passing laws against the teaching
of evolution was a way to gain a sense of
control over what children were being taught in the face
of all these changes to the educational system. Although Florida
and Oklahoma passed laws that were connected to this basic
issue in nineteen twenty three, it was Tennessee that became

(07:22):
the first state who explicitly forbid the teaching of evolution
in nineteen Representative John W. Butler introduced what became known
as the Butler Act on January twenty one of that year.
He had been interested in introducing similar legislation as far
back as nineteen twenty one, after hearing a sermon about

(07:43):
a young woman who had gone to college and come
home believing in evolution but not in God. Once Butler
had introduced the Act, there was some legislative back and forth,
but ultimately it passed both the Tennessee House and Senate
with overwhelming support. Tennessee's got owner, Austin p signed it
into law on March twenty one, after putting it off

(08:04):
until the last possible day and at one point telling
a senator that he thought the bill was absurd. P,
who was in his second term as governor, had already
instituted a number of progressive reforms within the state. He
was at that point trying to pass a massive school
reform bill that would do things like build high schools
in rural counties that didn't have them, length in the

(08:25):
school year, and make education compulsory. It's possible that P.
Finally signed the Butler Act in exchange for Congressional support
for his massive school reform bill, or that he recognized
that this bill and the reforms that it was instituting
would face some resistance in rural parts of Tennessee, so
he felt like the Butler Act would assuage some people's

(08:47):
fears over what he was wanting to do. Even when
he signed it, though he said it was mostly symbolic
and that he did not expect anyone to be charged
with violating it. The Butler Act made it illegal for
any teacher in Tennessee funded schools and universities to quote
teach any theory that denies the story of the divine
creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to

(09:09):
teach instead that man has descended from a lower order
of animals. It also established a fine of one hundred
to five hundred dollars, and the Act didn't really offer
insight on what to do about the fact that the
state approved biology textbook laid out the basic concepts of
evolution in chapter fourteen. This all brings us to the
Scopes trial, in which Tennessee teacher John Thomas Scopes was

(09:32):
charged with teaching evolution in defiance of the Butler Act.
He was convicted in a highly publicized trial that played
out in a pretty circus like atmosphere, and it had
a lot of famous names in the legal teams on
both sides. But the whole thing came about in a
way that's significantly different from what people might imagine. We
will have some details after the break. Although local attorneys

(09:59):
were also part of it, the Scopes trial involved a
hugely high profile cast of characters from out of town.
There was defense attorney Clarence Darrow, originally from Ohio, who
was one of America's most famous attorneys. He had represented
Eugene V. Debs after the massive Pullman strike of eighteen
ninety four. He had also defended Leopold and Loebe and

(10:22):
they're highly publicized murder trial. He's usually credited with getting
them a life murder sentence instead of being executed. And
the team on for the defense also included Arthur Garfield
Haze of New York, who was the a c l
Used General Council. The man arguing for the prosecution, William
Jennings Bryan the Great Commoner was originally from Illinois. He

(10:42):
had run for president three Times and served as Secretary
of State under Woodrow Wilson. In the years leading up
to the trial, he had also become one of the
most prominent anti evolution figures in the nation, giving speeches
with names like the Bible and its Enemies and the
Menace of Darwinism. H. L. Mankin, who wrote some of
the most famous and most memorable coverage of the trial,

(11:04):
was from Baltimore, Maryland, and his coverage ran in the
Baltimore Sun. Meanwhile, Dayton, Tennessee, originally founded as Smith's Crossroads,
was a town of less than eighteen hundred people situated
roughly between Chattanooga and Knoxville and the Tennessee River Valley.
In the late nineteenth century, it had become home to
the Dayton Iron and Coal Company, which, along with the railroad,

(11:25):
had become the town's major employer. But by the nineteen
teams the blast furnace had shut down, leaving farming as
the now struggling town's major industry. So between all the
big names and the struggling small town, it's easy to
imagine that this was a case of a bunch of
high falutant city folk blustering in uninvited to run rough

(11:45):
shot over everybody and basically have a giant, public unwanted fight.
But this was not the case at all, as still
happens today when a newly passed law seems to run
contrary to the Constitution or civil liberties. The butler immediately
caught the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union. The
a c l U publicly offered to defend any teacher

(12:07):
charged with its violation. An advertisement announcing that the a
c l U was seeking a test case ran in
a Chattanooga newspaper on May four. This advertisement came to
the attention of a group of Dayton's community and civic leaders.
Fred E. Robinson's drug store had become site of regular
meetings that included school superintendent Walter White, attorneys Herbert and

(12:32):
Sue Hicks, Cumberland Cole and Iron Company manager George Washington Rapilier,
and Robinson himself, who was also the school board president.
Some of them did care about the teaching of evolution
as a matter of principle, but they were far more
interested in the community of Dayton. They thought a great,
big trial would bring a lot of much needed attention

(12:54):
and tourism dollars to the town. Rapilier, which may also
have been Rapilier. Documents spell his name too different ways.
Is usually the person who's credited with convincing them all
to go along with this plan. To get the ball rolling,
they just needed a teacher, and the teacher in question
was John Thomas Scopes, who was then twenty four. Scopes

(13:16):
had graduated from the University of Kentucky the year before,
and he was working at the newly opened Ray County
High School, teaching algebra and physics, coaching football, and sometimes
substituting in biology. Dayton's civic leaders thought Scopes would be
a good candidate for this scheme because he was well
liked around town, he was not viewed as some kind
of radical, and he didn't have a family whose livelihood

(13:39):
would be threatened if he did lose his job. Although
they hoped it wouldn't come to that, Scopes wasn't particularly
eager to be arrested, but he agreed to go along
with this. He did not agree with the Butler Act.
He did not think it was possible to teach biology
without also teaching evolution, and he didn't think that evolution
was incompatible with religious faith. Scopes had even already at

(14:03):
least supposedly done the necessary teaching of evolution. The prior April,
he had done an exam review out of the state
approved biology textbook. Although he couldn't remember specifically, he thought
probably he'd gone over the chapter that included evolution. According
to some accounts, he later said that he had not,
but in any case, he was arrested for violating the

(14:23):
Butler Act on May seven, and he was indicted on May.
The town of Dayton then began to prepare for what
it hoped would be an onslaught of visitors from late
May until early July. The town built a tourist camp
to provide additional housing. It also added a number of
improvements to the court house, including an outdoor speakers platform

(14:46):
with benches and loud speakers to handle an overflow crowd.
To make the courtroom more hospitable to reporters and their work.
It also added camera platforms, radio microphones, and telephone and
telegraph lines. But it wasn't about accommodating lots of visitors.
Are making the courthouse more accessible to the news media.
Dayton also essentially turned part of its main road into

(15:08):
a festival grounds, complete with vendors and stalls, a scopes
trial Entertainment committee was formed. The Constable's motorcycle got a
new label. Monkeyville. Police businesses hung pictures of apes and
monkeys in their windows. A clothier who happened to be
named j R. Darwin made the most of it with

(15:29):
signs like Darwin is right inside and Darwin's Big Sale.
A whole lot of store suddenly started stocking plush monkeys.
Fred Robinson, whose uh drug store had been the site
of the first conversation about hatching this plot, Fred Robinson
started serving Semion sodas at the drug store. He strung

(15:50):
a giant banner across the street reading Robinson's drug Store
with where it started in smaller letters. Underneath. There were
also photo ops at the table where that an show
conversation had taken place. A chimpanzee named Joe Mendy, dressed
in a plaid suit and bow tie, who was one
of multiple chimpanzees brought into town for this was there

(16:11):
to greet his customers when they came into the store.
And in addition to all the business involvement in the
overall carnival atmosphere, where a tinerant evangelists who came to
town to preach about the evils of evolution and the
rightness of banning it from school. Another banner was strung
outside the courthouse that read, read your Bible, Bible in

(16:31):
all caps. Of course in theory, all of this big
monkey festival was going on because of a trial like
in court, which we were going to talk about. After
another quick sponsor break, jury's selection in the Scopes trial

(16:51):
began on July. On that same day, the judge John T.
Ralston took the precaution of impaneling a second r and
jury to reindicte John Scopes. People had been so worried
that some other town was going to have this same
idea and hatch the same plan that the first indictment
had been rushed through, and the judge was worried that

(17:13):
it was invalid. Actual trial proceedings were put off until
the following Monday to allow time for the radio hookups
that had been installed in the courtroom to actually be
connected for broadcasts. The Scopes trial would be the first
trial to be publicly broadcast nationwide, and it was also
filmed for newsreels that were distributed to movie theaters. The

(17:35):
defense and the prosecution each had a completely different focus
for this trial. From the prosecution's point of view, it
was really simple. They would establish that John Thomas Scopes
violated the Butler Act, which was state law, by teaching
evolution in a public school, and they would establish that
the state of Tennessee had the right to set its
own standards for the public school curriculum. The defenses most

(17:59):
practical folk us was whether the Act itself was enforceable,
whether it's definition of evolution was precise enough, and whether
a teacher had to both deny the story of divine
creation and teach that man had descended from lower animals
to be in violation of the law. But beyond that,
it was looking at much broader issues than the defense
was like establishing whether the Butler Act was religiously motivated

(18:22):
and that evolution was scientifically sound. Let's focus on religion,
and this angle of religion versus science was really coming
from Clarence Darrow, who was a very vocal agnostic. The
a c. L U, which was reluctant to have Darrow
involved in this at all, viewed the Butler Act primarily
as an act on the freedom of speech, not on

(18:43):
the freedom of religion. This was in part because the
Supreme Court had previously ruled that the free speech clauses
of the First Amendment applied to state governments as well
as to the federal government, it had not yet made
such a ruling related to the freedom of religion, and
that wouldn't happen for several more decades. So basically, the
a c. L U was really looking at this as

(19:05):
a speech issue, and Clarence Darrow was in his own
little world focusing on the religious aspect. Once the trial began,
about a thousand people tried to cram into the courtroom,
which could hold about six hundred, and that happened every day.
The rest listened from benches outside the courthouse. The courtroom

(19:25):
was incredibly tight and incredibly hot, since the giant crush
of people blocked the courtroom's windows, and at least at
the start of the trial, it had no electric fans
to circulate air. Apart from reporters representing more than one
hundred newspapers, most of those trying to watch were locals
and not visitors. So even though Dayton had turned the

(19:45):
town into a sort of Scopes trial fair, it hadn't
had the hoped for rush of tourists. The trial began
with some fairly straightforward questioning of students and other witnesses
who's testified about scopes discussions of evolution. But when Darrow
started trying to bring in expert witnesses to discuss the
science of evolution, Judge Rawlston refused to allow it. He

(20:09):
said that the matter at hand was not whether evolution
was scientifically valid, but whether Scopes had broken the law. Indeed,
that would seem to be the point of the trial. Purportedly,
with a key part of his defense strategy effectively torpedoed,
Clarence Darrow took another tack. Instead of calling scientists to
the stand testify as to the validity of the theory

(20:31):
of evolution, he took the highly unusual step of calling
William Jennings Bryan, the opposing counsel, to the stand on
July twenty, to act as an expert witness on the
validity of the Bible. At this point, the proceedings had
been moved outdoors due to the oppressive heat in the
courtroom and cracks developing in the ceiling under the weight
of the newly installed fans. I just want to say again,

(20:56):
the defense counsel calling to the stand the prosecutor to
answer questions about something really not related to the issue. Hand,
that's weird. That's it feels a little showbody like it's
a big like yeah, drama move yeah. So, when Darrow
asked if Brian claimed that everything in the Bible should

(21:19):
be literally interpreted William Jennings, Bryan answered, quote, I believe
everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is
given there some of the Bible is given illustratively. Following
that answer, Darrow asked him a bunch of questions about
particular passages from the Bible, like Jonah being swallowed by

(21:39):
a whale and spit out a whole after three days,
and Joshua commanding the sun to sand still and the
Great Flood, and whether the six day creation in Genesis
was six actual twenty four hour days, and whether Eve
was literally made from Adam's rib. Basically every Internet conversation
of people of like atheist people asking people of faith

(22:03):
questions about the Bible, Bryant's answers, in many cases sounded
imprecise or contradictory, and at the end he accused Darrow
of trying to use the court to slur the Bible.
How this was received really depends on who you ask.
Many religious faithful felt as though William Jennings Bryan had
conducted himself admirably in the face of someone who was

(22:24):
clearly trying to humiliate and trap him. Although some Biblical
literalists were disappointed at his description of the six days
of Creation as periods, not literal days. Others thought the
whole exchange was an absurd waste of time unrelated to
the case. But a lot of the news media, like
we said, there were a hundred papers represented their portrayed

(22:47):
Brian in an incredibly negative light, and the Baltimore Evening
Sun H. L. Menkin wrote quote, Thus he fought his
last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzy
and preposterous, and after that pathetic all sense departed from him.
He bit right and left like a dog with rabies.

(23:08):
He descended to demagogi, so dreadful that his very associates blushed.
His one yearning was to keep his yokels. Heated up
to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe
alas refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the
battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally

(23:32):
yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor Brian
into a folly almost incredible. The next day, July one,
the judge ruled that Brian could not return to the stand.
Darrow then asked for the jury to begin deliberations, recommending
that they find the defendant guilty. The jury returned with

(23:52):
a verdict less than ten minutes later. Scopes, who had
never taken the stand himself, was guilty. He was fined
one dollars. The a c o used goal at this point,
and the reason that Darrow, who was the defense attorney,
recommend that the jury find his client guilty, was to
appeal this verdict, ideally to appeal it all the way

(24:12):
to the Supreme Court in a case that would find
laws like the Butler Act unconstitutional nationwide. But that did
not happen. At scopes appeal before the Tennessee Supreme Court,
the verdict was overturned on a technicality, and the original
trial judge Rawlson had specified that hundred dollar penalty, but
because the penalty was greater than fifty dollars under the

(24:33):
Tennessee Constitution, it should have been levied by the jury
not by a judge, with the verdict overturned, and the
Tennessee Supreme Court also issuing an opinion that the Butler
Act was constitutional because it didn't mandate or establish any
religious belief for practice the A c. O. You had
nothing left to pursue related to the Butler Act in Tennessee.

(24:54):
Five days after the end of the Scopes trial, William
Jennings Bryan died in his sleep during an afternoon nap.
He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with the words
he kept the Faith on his tombstone, and the romanticized
version of this story is that he died of humiliation
after Darrow's questioning, or that he died of heartbreak after
being denied the opportunity to give his closing statement at

(25:16):
the trial. The two leading candidates for the actual cause
of death are untreated diabetes and stroke. Whatever the cause,
it was almost certainly exacerbated by the stress and physically
grueling heat in the trial. From that point, Brian was
viewed as a martyr within the anti evolution movement. Five
years later, Brian College, originally called William Jennings Bryan University,

(25:39):
opened in Dayton as a Christian liberal arts college. The
Scopes trial had a somewhat contradictory aftermath. Tennessee in general
and Dayton specifically were roundly laughed at in the news media,
which was also particularly unkind to both religious fundamentalism and
two laws forbidding the teaching of evolution, and yet similar

(26:01):
laws were introduced, although unsuccessfully, in the legislatures of California, Delaware, Florida, Maine, Minnesota,
New Hampshire, North Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia in the
years following the Scopes trial. Arkansas and Mississippi each past
laws banning the teaching of evolution. Not long after, Even
though only three states explicitly outlawed the teaching of evolution,

(26:24):
many textbook publishers quietly removed references to it from their
biology textbooks. This included a new Civic Biology whose seven
edition never specifically references evolution and tiptoes around the basic concepts.
At the same time, the coverage of the trial and
of William Jennings Bryant's death helped coalesce the anti evolution

(26:46):
movement from sort of a scattered collection of various denominations
to a solid social movement and Darrow's relentless framing of
evolution and religion, as this either or proposition submits to
the standard for how the issue would be discussed four
years to come. Attempts to repeal the Butler Act began

(27:06):
in nineteen thirty five, but failed. It stayed on the
books until nineteen sixty seven. Governor Austin P died in
nineteen twenty seven, and his signature on the Butler Act
largely overshadowed the rest of his legacy for decades. It
would also take decades for a case relating to the
teaching of evolution to make it all the way to

(27:27):
the Supreme Court. In nineteen sixty eight, the Supreme Court
heard the case of Susan Epperson, an Arkansas zoology teacher
who had been found guilty of breaking that state's law
prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled
in Epperson versus Arkansas that laws prohibiting the teaching of
evolution violated the First Amendment, and in this case, Epperson

(27:49):
faced the same dilemma that Scopes did back in nineteen
twenty five. Arkansas law had made it illegal quote to
teach the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended
from a lower order of animals end quote, But the
textbook that the state had adopted in nineteen sixty five
had a chapter on that very thing. After Everson versus Arkansas,

(28:11):
most states that had previously banned the teaching of evolution
instead mandated that equal time be spent on teaching creationism.
This includes Tennessee, which passed the nation's first law requiring
equal time for the Biblical account of creation. In nineteen
seventy three, a federal appeals court ruled this law unconstitutional.
Two years later, that ruling applied only to Tennessee, but

(28:35):
in nineteen eighty seven, the Supreme Court ruled that a
Louisiana law entitled quote, the Balanced Treatment for Creation Science
and Evolution Science in Public School Instruction Act was unconstitutional.
That case, known as Edward versus Aguiard, applied nationally. From there,
most states that had passed equal time laws instead began

(28:57):
to frame the conversation as one of intelligent design line
or began mandating disclaimers that evolution is just a theory.
In two thousand five, a U. S. District court found
that teaching intelligent design in public schools was unconstitutional in
a case known as kits Miller versus Dover because intelligent
design quote cannot uncouple itself from its creationist and thus

(29:19):
religious antecedents. The same year, in Salman versus Cobb County
School District, a federal judge examined the question of whether
stickers reading quote evolution is a theory not a fact,
concerning the origin of living things end quote, which the
school was putting onto textbooks that had information about evolution,

(29:40):
whether that violated the Constitution, And after going back and
forth through several levels of the courts, that case was
ultimately settled out of court in favor of the plaintiffs,
who were the ones who had objected to the use
of the stickers. So clearly, as states find new ways
to work around this issue, it's probably one that will
continue to come up in the courts. And in the meantime, Dayton, Tennessee,

(30:04):
actually holds an annual Scopes Trial festival. If you want
to get in on that. If if you yeah, it's uh.
It's an interesting phenomenon because it's partially because I mean,
Dayton was really lampooned a lot after this, uh and
and Tennessee also got a lot of just terrible press afterward. Um.

(30:28):
So some of the Scopes festival is meant to try
to reclaim some of like the less like let's make
complete fun of you side, some more like own this
is the thing that happened in our town that was
historically important, and not like the way that the media
portrayed us was totally accurate, Like not like that at all. Um.

(30:50):
But it's definitely like there's a play and there's a
festival happens every year. Are there both monkeys and chimpanzees?
I do not know? Um. As I was first looking
for artwork because you know, on our website we always
have pictures, a picture that goes along with the episode.
And as I was looking for artwork before I had
done the actual research, like I hadn't gotten into the

(31:13):
meat of it yet, and I kept finding this picture
of a chimpanzee in a suit, and I was like,
what is this? Is this some weird stock art somebody
came up? No, it was the actual chimpanzee in the suit.
Um that was doing public appearances, doing public appearances at
the drug store during Good Scripts trial. What's the listener
mail situation. I have some listener mail. It's another piece

(31:35):
of mail that we got following our podcast on the
Tuskegee syphilis study, and it is from Rachel. Rachel says, Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I stumbled across your podcast a little
over a year ago, and your show quickly found its
way to my history loving heart. You're my trustee companions
on long drives to visit my boyfriend. I'm writing specifically
in regard to your recent podcast about the Tuskeye syphilis study.

(31:58):
I was a history underground ad and my graduate degree
is in public health, specifically epidemiology, so all of your
health related topics bring me such joy. I loved your
discussion about the topic, as painful as subject as it is.
I would just like to add a tiny note. The
horrible events at Tuskegee have shaped public health in a
very profound way. Students and health fields across the country

(32:21):
and the world have learned about the atrocities of this study,
and multiple safeguards, such as the Institutional Review Board i
RB now exists to extensively review any study that includes
human subjects. As you mentioned in the podcast, the study
itself was horrendously unethical informed consent aside. Institutional review boards
are today's safeguard against unethical research studies and require at

(32:45):
least one member who was unaffiliated with the research institutions.
An opportunity to serve on an i r B is
likely available to some listeners. While these men and their
families were tremendously harmed, it brings me some peace to
know that steps have been taken to prevent others from
mixed experiencing what they did. And then Rachel continues with
some suggestions for future episodes. Thank you so much, Rachel

(33:08):
for sending that. We've talked about a few of the
things that UM came about in the aftermath of the
Tuskee Study, but not specifically the i r B. So
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at how
stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at
miss in History. Are Tumbler, and our pinterests and our

(33:28):
Instagram are all also at miss in History. You can
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Works dot com find information about just about anything your
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You can come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com, where you will find the show notes
for this and all of our other episodes that Holly
and I have done together, and an archive of every

(33:50):
episode that has ever been on the show. You can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
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