Paige Williams on Marquis James's Preview of the Scopes Monkey Trial

One of the first New Yorker writers hired by Harold Ross, the founding editor, was Marquis James. The men were good friends whose wives were also good friends; the couples vacationed together. James's début feature ran in the second issue, in February, 1925. I could have written this piece about that piece, a Profile of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a child of Theodore Roosevelt, based on the following passage alone: “She knows men, measures and motives; has an understanding grasp of their changes. That's all there is to what is grandiosely known as ‘public affairs.”

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July 11, 1925

Several issues later, James turned to the subject of John Francis Hylan, New York's mayor. Then Ross sent him to Tennessee.

The A.C.L.U. had published a newspaper ad offering to defend anyone who would test the constitutionality of a new state law that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. A criminal case pitting religious fundamentalism against scientific modernism promised to be sensational and, for the host town, lucrative. Dayton, a small community near Chattanooga, had lost a factory to bankruptcy and needed the boost.

Civic leaders decided to stage a case. They asked a substitute high-school teacher, John Scopes, to consent to be indicted on charges of teaching that humankind descended from apes. Scopes, who was twenty-four, wasn't convinced that he had taught evolution, but he definitely wasn't trafficking in Adam's rib. He agreed to be prosecuted.

James arrived in Dayton to find a swarm of journalistic competitors. Time, Life, and the Times were there. The Baltimore