In the summer of 1925, a 24-year-old substitute teacher named John Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in violation of the state's new Butler Act. But the Scopes Monkey Trial did not begin with a crime or an investigation. It began with local businessmen at Robinson's drugstore who saw the ACLU's offer to fund a test case as a way to bring tourists and money to a struggling town. Scopes could not even remember whether he had taught evolution, and coached his own students on how to testify against him.

This episode follows how a manufactured legal test case became the first US trial broadcast nationally on radio, drawing William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, more than 200 reporters and a performing chimpanzee to a town of 1,800. It covers H.L. Mencken's slanted coverage, Darrow's two-hour cross-examination of B ...