Popular conceptions of the trial as the triumph of science in an epic battle with religion have been shaped by journalists, artists, and historians. Six years after the trial, the popular-culture chronicler, Frederick Lewis Allen, maintained that while Fundamentalism had won the battle (because Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law against teaching evolution), it had clearly lost the war against modernism. In the 1950s, two playwrights associated with The Ohio State University's Theatre Department wrote a play, Inherit the Wind, which despite the authors' protestations that it not be considered as "history," became the major medium through which Americans "remembered" the trial. The play, whose real target was the intolerance of the Red Scare-McCarthy movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, emphasized the victory of reason and modernism over fundamentalism and religion; at least three film adaptations have continued that view of the story. In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter proclaimed, in an even more emphatic way than had Allen, that the trial represented the "last gasp" of rural America in its quest to define American values. Even the courts employed the legend of the Scopes case in written decisions.

At the end of the century, however, two historians, Edward J. Larson and Paul K. Conkin, placed the controversies into broader and more conceptually-sound contexts and corrected some misunderstandings about the 1925 trial. From them, we know that the various positions of the combatants in Dayton in 1925 were more complex than the legend proclaimed (particularly in the positions of William J. Bryan, the purported defender of Fundamentalism) and that, contrary to a last gasp, the trial encouraged Fundamentalists to try other avenues through which to promote their points of view. A flurry of activity occurred in the 1960s, with Tennessee rescinding its law, but with other states adding restrictions on the teaching of evolution. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arkansas' law. In several states during the 1990s, Fundamentalists have taken two tacts in the war: They have opened more private, religious-based schools and have lobbied to force biology teachers to include "creation science" in the curriculum. Given these legacies, surely Scopes is in fact the trial of the century.