To find out for yourself just what issues were involved in the Scopes trial, visit my FR homepage and download Hunter's Civic Biology, the textbook that caused all the fuss. Then read the darwinism portions.
John T. Scopes himself, writing 40 years later, said that the whole business was set up in a meeting in the general store with several of the local authorities. They wanted a media circus that would draw attention to Dayton, and they thought a test case of the new law would be just the thing. (They were right.) He just agreed to stipulate that he “taught evolution” for the two weeks that he had substituted for the bio teacher, even though he had no memory of actually doing it.