May 14, 1925—THIS DAY IN SCOPES HISTORY
Prosecuting attorney Sue Hicks formally notifies William Jennings Bryan, former U.S. secretary of state and three-time Democratic nominee for president, that “we will consider it a great honor to have you with us in this prosecution” of John Scopes. Bryan accepted Hicks’s invitation, thereby ensuring that Scopes’s upcoming trial would attract national media coverage.
John Randolph Neal becomes John Scopes’s chief counsel. Scopes claimed in 1967 that Neal “appeared in Dayton and more or less appointed himself my counsel… whether you want me or not.” However, Neal told the Chattanooga Times on July 4, 1925 (i.e., just before the trial started) that “I was requested to become interested in the case. I did not enter until requested by Scopes himself, and then after the warrant had been served on him.” Although Neal—a native of Rhea County—was the only Southerner on Scopes’s defense team, most of Scopes’s prosecutors were Southerners. Neal told a reporter from the Knoxville News that he planned to call University of Tennessee president H.A. Morgan to testify in Scopes’s trial, but he was never called.
