Released in 2010, Alleged is an award-winning movie about the “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, TN. Supported by a company of able though less known actors, Brian Dennehy and Senator Fred Thompson play the flamboyant opposing lawyers, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively.

In the lingering shadow of the 1923 recession, Dayton was suffering especially because the local coal mine had closed. Some local leaders were looking for ways to put the town on the map again, so they promoted a controversial trial that would bring people from afar and would make the Butler Act unpopular. Tennessee’s Butler Act stated in general that it was illegal to teach in the public schools the idea that mankind came from primates and not from the direct creation of God.

John Scopes was talked into confessing that he had taught evolution in a biology class as a substitute teacher even though he was just the coach. The community leaders cooked up the scheme to have a court case that would create a lot of publicity for the town. Nationally famous people were contacted to bring more notoriety to the case. Clarence Darrow and the ACLU were brought into the act and did most of the planning.

The love story angle of the plot involved a young struggling local reporter who was tempted to support the evolution side of the controversy in order to get attention and perhaps a job with the Baltimore Sun. Rose, his fiancée and stenographer, was a traditional person who preferred sticking to Biblical principles.  H. L. Mencken, the renowned writer from the Baltimore Sun and avowed atheist, came to town to support the defense side of the trial, to influence the crowds, and to popularize evolution not only in Dayton but across the country. Several other atheist evolutionists came to Dayton also to popularize the theory of human evolution.

It was interesting to watch the flip flop in the legal strategy. Clarence Darrow, a devoted reader of Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) and Nietzsche (of “God is Dead” fame), was brought in to defend John Scopes.  In the end, Darrow declared his client to be guilty so that an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court would be possible. Such an appeal would bring more nationwide notoriety to the issue. Darrow’s whole purpose was to popularize evolution.

A sub-theme of Alleged involves Rose’s half sister, Abigail, who was black and in a home for mentally or physically handicapped children. Alleged exposes the now rarely remembered practice of sterilization of the handicapped that involved 60,000 Americans from the late 20s to the late 30s.  Sterilization of the handicapped was an attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool.  Imposed in many states, sterilization laws were formally approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in the case of Buck v. Bell. At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, Nazi doctors explicitly cited Justice Holmes's opinion in Buck v. Bell in defense of their eugenics program.

According to the makers of Alleged, its presentation more accurately portrays the facts of the Scopes trial than did the famous 1960 move, Inherit the Wind.  Even so, Alleged adds fictional side story elements to showcase the controversies about the struggles for control of public education content and the eugenics movement that found “scientific” support in Darwinian evolution theory.

Thought-provoking and entertaining, Alleged counters the distortions of Inherit the Wind yet stands on its own merits to stimulate thinking about the interplay of historical facts, scientific knowledge, and influential propaganda that continues to this day.