John Randolph Neal Jr. (September 17, 1876 – November 23, 1959) was an American attorney, law professor, politician, and activist, best known for his role as chief counsel during the 1925 Scopes Trial, and as an advocate for the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1920s and 1930s.
[2] His father had been an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War, and served in the United States House of Representatives from 1885 to 1889, when he died.
He continued lecturing at the University of Denver during months when the legislature was not in session, however, and thus lived in the district he represented for only part of the year, causing some agitation among his constituents.
[3]: 34 Neal spent his term in the House advocating legislation to better organize boards of education, acquiring consistent funding for schools, and implementing more rigid mine inspection standards.
[3]: 34 In early 1909, the senate attempted to pass a bill transferring the power to select county election officials from the governor to the legislature.
[3]: 38 His unconventional style, while popular with students, frustrated university administrators, especially the law school dean, Malcolm McDermott.
[6]: 79 The firing of Neal caused outrage among College of Law alumni, who petitioned the board of trustees to reinstate him.
[3]: 40 At the meeting, Morgan spoke first, and accused Neal of frequently missing classes with no excuse, giving extremely easy exams which he often failed to monitor or even grade, never keeping record of attendance, and ignoring the smoking ban in Ayres Hall.
[3]: 45 In 1925, Dayton teacher John T. Scopes was arrested for teaching the Theory of Evolution, in violation of the state's Butler Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was interested in the case's constitutional aspects, advised Neal to decline the offer, fearing Darrow would turn the trial into a religious debate.
[6]: 103 Upon Darrow's arrival in Dayton, he and Neal immediately began fighting over trial strategy, and each conspired to have the other removed from the defense team.
[6]: 210 While Neal's role was somewhat minimized, he nevertheless remained part of the defense team throughout the appeals process, and consistently sought to move the case into the federal court system.
He stated that the nation's navigable waterways and the electricity they generated belonged to the people, and warned that private control of the river would give energy companies monopolistic power.
[3]: 53 Neal was present (often uninvited) at virtually every meeting on the river's future in the late 1920s, and was often the lone dissenter in favor of public control.
[3]: 56 Neal took an active interest in the government's completion of Wilson Dam in Alabama in the early 1920s (one of the charges against him during the "Slaughter" incident was that he missed numerous classes while travelling to Muscle Shoals).
[3]: 42, 49 In 1925, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the river, and held a meeting in December of that year to discuss allowing power companies to bid for dam sites.
[3]: 57 With the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Norris's act was finally able to pass, creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.
[3]: 46 Neal spent the last few years of his life at his home in Spring City,[2] occasionally visiting nearby Watts Bar Dam.
[3]: 61 He once appeared on a platform with Eleanor Roosevelt with his shoes untied and shirt and pants unbuttoned,[3]: 60 and spent much of the Scopes Trial unshaven and disheveled.
[3]: 62 In The Great Monkey Trial, L. Sprague de Camp described Neal as "eccentric and absent-minded," and "as dirty as some early Christian saints.
"[3]: 62 Commenting on Neal's reputation as a wishy-washy politician, humorist Will Rogers wrote, "I don't know about the wishy, but he certainly is not washy.
[3]: 60 In Cormac McCarthy's 1979 novel, Suttree, the title character runs into Neal, who had been a friend of his father's, while walking through the streets of Knoxville in the 1950s.