It was the “trial of the century.” On July 10, 1925, a courtroom in Tennessee was center stage in a contest pitting two courtroom titans against each other, arguing science versus religion on a grand scale, with the full cooperation of an enthusiastic pack of journalists more interested in a spectacle. Imagine that!
In real fact, the trial began as a sort of small-town publicity stunt. But the argument at its center, between the Bible and Charles Darwin, still isn’t settled in many minds. This is one issue that just won’t go away.
The drama began when Tennessee made it a crime to teach Darwin’s evolutionary theories in Tennessee schools under a 1925 law called the “Butler Act.
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
Seizing on the law as an assault on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union –then neither as famous nor infamous as it is today– posted a newspaper notice offering its services to defend anyone who wanted to challenge the law. Some local boosters in a Dayton, Tennessee drugstore thought that such a trial would be a great way to drum up publicity for the town which had seen better days. They sought out a young substitute science teacher named John Scopes. And with the cooperation of the school superintendent and two local attorneys who were friends of Scopes, the 24-year-old Scopes was arrested and charged with defying the Butler Act by using a textbook that introduced Darwin’s theories.
The key to the national attention the 8-day trial received was the presence of William Jennings Bryan, a politician who had run unsuccessfully for the Presidency three times (in 1896, 1900 and 1908) and was renowned for his skill as a stump speaker. A fundamentalist and populist known as “the Great Commoner,” Bryan was leading a crusade against Darwin, in part to keep his public profile high. Bryan joined the prosecution team. Opposing him was the most famous defense attorney of his day, Clarence Darrow.
Quickly nicknamed the “Monkey Trial,” the proceedings inspired a carnival-like atmosphere, just as the Dayton boosters had hoped, attracting thousands of spectators to the small county courthouse, along with journalists from around the country. Among them was H.L. Mencken, the iconoclastic Baltimore newsman, who had called Bryan the “Fundamentalist Pope.” Live updates from the proceedings were also broadcast on the radio, a first for a trial.
The culmination of the trial was the seventh-day exchange between Darrow and Bryan after Darrow called the fundamentalist leader to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. He then dismantled most of Bryan’s arguments regarding the literal truth of the Bible.
After this withering exchange, Darrow actually asked the judge to convict Scopes. He hoped that the case would go to a higher court where Darrow could appeal the decision on philosophical and Constitutional grounds. Scopes was duly convicted and fined $100 –but not jailed.
A few days after the trial, William Jennings Bryan died in Dayton.
The case was appealed, as Darrow had hoped, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality rather than the Constitutional reversal that Darrow and the ACLU sought. And as recent history surely bears out, the argument did not end there. Creationist advocates –later using the term “Intelligent Design”– continued the assault on teaching of evolution into recent times. In one of the most decisive modern cases, in Dover, Pennsylvania, Judge John E. Jones, a Republican appointee, handed the forces of “Creationism/Intelligent Design” a stinging defeat on December 20, 2005. In his 139-page ruling, Jones wrote;
Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.
Here is the New York Times report on the decision. It includes a complete text of the decision: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/education/21evolution.html?scp=1&sq=dover%20pa%20decision%20creationism&st=cse
The 1925 courtroom drama in Dayton was fictionalized in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, later made into a 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy, and remade on television several times.
Extensive documentation about the case can be found at the website of the Law School at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm
The “American Experience” (PBS) aired a documentary on the Scopes Trial. Information at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/
