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A Century Ago, a High School Teacher From a Small Tennessee Town Ignited a National Debate Over Human Evolution
The Scopes “monkey trial” garnered international attention, and the battle that was fought continues in some form in other states today
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A hundred years ago this summer, the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, was thrust into the international spotlight as one of the most famous legal confrontations of the 20th century got underway. The Scopes “monkey trial” was superficially about teaching evolution, but it also highlighted the relationship between science and faith, and wrestled with the importance of free speech.
The man at the center of the storm, a 24-year-old high school teacher named John T. Scopes, was accused of violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution. Much more famous were the lawyers on both sides of the case: William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state, arguing for the prosecution; and, from the defense team, Clarence Darrow, often described as one of the great legal minds of his time.
Hundreds of townspeople and visitors crammed into the red-brick Rhea County Courthouse to witness the trial. Some 200 journalists descended on Dayton, reporting for newspapers across the South and the Northeast; the trial sparked coverage from as far away as Europe, Russia, China and Japan. The proceedings would eventually inspire the play and the movie Inherit the Wind.
“On the surface, the trial was about something that seemed small—whether a high school teacher who taught evolution in his biology class broke the law,” says Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, published last year. “But it was really about change, and how we embrace it or resist it.”
Wineapple points to various upheavals that had swept across the country in the years immediately before the trial: Women had recently won the right to vote; immigration brought millions of newcomers to the country; many Black men and women had moved from the South to northern cities; workers were striking for better pay; and the radio, telephone and movies changed how ordinary people lived. A brutal World War had also ended only a few years earlier. While Darwin’s theory of evolution, first published in 1859, had no explicit connection to these events, Wineapple says that for many it seemed emblematic of the times. “It’s almost as if the theory of evolution had become a proxy for all these changes,” she says.
Scopes was accused of violating the Butler Act, a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public schools from teaching that humans evolved from what it called “lower orders of animals,” and from denying the account of humanity’s origins found in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. The American Civil Liberties Union immediately sought to oppose the law, but it needed a volunteer to serve as a test case—and Scopes came forward.
“The ACLU was looking for a volunteer to challenge the constitutionality of the Butler Act,” says Amanda Townley, executive director of the Oakland, California-based National Center for Science Education. “So John Scopes wasn’t this ‘hapless victim’ science teacher. He was a volunteer. It was a test case, and it was planned accordingly.”
From the beginning, the landmark case drew intense interest. Dayton’s few hotels and rooming houses filled up. Banners hung around the town sported slogans like “Read your Bible” and “You need God in your business.” Two monkeys were put on display in an empty shop. A carnival-like atmosphere engulfed the town, with vendors hawking tawdry monkey-themed souvenirs.
If the Scopes trial happened today, “it would be a pay-per-view event,” Townley says.
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While the trial may have had the appearance of pitting science against faith, scholars believe this is an oversimplification.
“The Scopes trial is often misperceived as a clash between science and religion,” says Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. “Few of the people involved would have described it so.” Bryan’s primary concern, Branch says, was that he felt scientists were overreaching, and in doing so were undermining at least one particular brand of Christianity, in which the Bible is taken to be literally true—not just on questions of ethics and morality, but also on matters of history and the nature of the world. Meanwhile, Branch points out that most of those on the defense team were Christians themselves, although of a more moderate leaning—while Darrow was a self-avowed agnostic and secularist. Most of those arguing for the defense, says Branch, would have viewed the trial as “a clash between dogmatic religion and scientific claims that were compatible with a more enlightened faith.”
Darwin’s groundbreaking book, On the Origin of Species, had sparked intense debate since its publication; yet not all religious people saw it as an affront to their faith. Some religious thinkers interpreted Darwin’s theory as saying that evolution was merely the method by which God created living creatures—in other words, while it may have changed our ideas about how God created the world, it did not remove God from the picture.
“If you look closely at the Origin, Darwin gives Christians a way out, because his argument is that God uses evolution as a natural process through which his intentions are fulfilled,” says Bernard Lightman, a historian of science at York University in Toronto. “Some theologians were comforted by this.”
Nonetheless, some traditionalists did view the idea of evolution as repugnant, perhaps even dangerous. Bryan himself appears to have held such a view; at the very least, he knew how to use popular resistance to evolution to rile up a crowd: “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death,” he declared ahead of the trial. “It has been in the past a death grapple in the dark; from this time on it will be a death grapple in the light.”
An evangelical preacher named Billy Sunday had been even harsher, describing evolution as a “God-forsaken, hell-born bastard theory” and warning of public schools becoming “a clearing house” for “God-forsaken, dirty politics.” He called Darwin a “rotten old infidel.”
Sunday’s views were extreme, but even less ardent conservatives were troubled by the idea of humans being descended from ape-like ancestors. (The theory was also widely misunderstood, as it is even today: Darwin’s theory doesn’t say that humans evolved “from apes,” only that humans and apes share a common ancestor.)
In fact, the trial itself did not see Darwin’s theory scrutinized in any great detail, and most of the scientists whom the defense wanted to present as expert witnesses were never given the chance to testify. For Darrow, however, the central issue was not what Scopes taught his students, but whether he should have freedom in what he taught, and whether students should be free to read and learn without government interference.
“Basically, Clarence Darrow was able to successfully persuade not only the judge, but the townspeople, that William Jennings Bryan was a little too zealous in his critique of Scopes, and evolution,” says Lightman. “But secondly, the thing that Darrow values most is the ability to think—that’s the thing he says is on trial, not evolution.”
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Often, Darrow spoke with great eloquence; at one point he said: “One man’s liberty cannot be protected without protecting all men’s liberties.” But at other times he was brash, even arrogant: “Nothing will satisfy us but a broad victory,” he said, “to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religo-maniacs.”
The trial’s most dramatic turn came when Darrow called Bryan himself to the witness stand, grilling him on his beliefs about the Bible. (While the 1960 film version of Inherit the Wind took a great deal of poetic license—the filmmakers changed the names of the characters and even the name of the town—this scene is depicted fairly accurately, with much of the dialogue taken verbatim from the trial transcripts.) Darrow asked Bryan if he believed the world was really created in six days, and if so, whether these were 24-hour days. And he inquired if Joshua literally made the sun stand still, as described in Genesis—and if he did, would that mean the Earth stopped spinning? Bryan replied confidently at first, but he struggled as the cross-examination went on—which it did, for two solid hours. (Something the film omits: Due to the oppressive July heat, and also because of fears that the floor of the second-floor courtroom would buckle under the weight of so many onlookers, this session took place outdoors, on the courthouse lawn.)
“Bryan, in a sense, was hoisted on his own petard,” says Wineapple. When he admitted that the six days of creation may have been symbolic days, not necessarily lasting 24 hours, “that was his undoing,” she says. “Once he said that, it’s no longer a literalist reading [of the Bible].”
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The issue of race, meanwhile, lurked in the background. Darwin’s theory says that all of humankind descended from a common ancestor, suggesting that alleged differences between the races may be only skin deep. As Wineapple put it in Keeping the Faith: “Underlying this anxiety about the origins of humankind was of course another anxiety: that the vaunted superiority of the so-called Nordics may be a fiction.” She also notes the long history of using racist language to describe Black people: “Comparing Black people to monkeys and other animals was one of the many ways white people dehumanized Blacks and rationalized slavery.”
The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, observed that if Darwin’s theory were correct, white people would “have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise.”
The trial also highlighted America’s urban-rural divide, with Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken dismissing the locals in Dayton as “yokels,” “morons,” and “ignoramuses.” (Mencken also dubbed the affair the “monkey trial.”)
Darrow, in spite of his powerful oratory, and in spite of outmaneuvering Bryan during their exchange, was up against the fact that Scopes had admitted to teaching evolution, in violation of the Butler Act. After eight days of testimony, the jury took less than ten minutes to find Scopes guilty. The judge ordered him to pay a $100 fine. The Tennessee Supreme Court later upheld the conviction, as well as the constitutionality of the Butler Act, and citing a technicality moved to prevent any further appeals. The Butler Act was finally repealed in 1967, making it legal for evolution to be taught in the state’s schools.
The Scopes trial was the most famous attack launched by anti-evolutionists against Darwin’s theory, but it was not the last. In the 1970s, creationists pushed to have “scientific creationism” given equal time in public schools, along with evolution; the movement culminated in a trial in Arkansas in the early 1980s, with the judge ruling that scientific creationism was a religious idea not a scientific one, and therefore teaching it in a science classroom would be a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. In the 1990s and early 2000s, opponents of evolution pushed for the teaching of “intelligent design,” leading to a trial in Pennsylvania in 2005. The outcome was similar, with a judge ruling that intelligent design is not science, and that forcing teachers to give equal time to intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin’s theory would be unconstitutional. But similar movements continue: Today, bills calling for the teaching of the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories—clearly with an eye on evolution—have become commonplace. (West Virginia recently passed a law allowing intelligent design to be taught in public schools, while a similar proposed law in North Dakota was narrowly defeated.)
Resistance to evolution is not unique to the United States, but the interplay among religion, government and education that so frequently puts Darwin’s theory in the spotlight is often seen as a peculiarly American phenomenon, with many in the U.S. embracing a literalist interpretation of the Bible, and education largely being controlled at a local level. Today, one in three Americans continue to reject the idea that humans evolved from nonhuman animals, and surveys show that resistance to evolution is significantly higher in the U.S. than in Europe or Japan. Even so, public acceptance of Darwin’s theory has been increasing in the U.S., says Branch, noting that “evolution education has improved by leaps and bounds since 1925.”
With the Scopes trial over, calm and quiet returned to Dayton. While a century has passed since the iconic trial, however, many of its themes continue to resonate, says Townley. “The trial was symbolic of the deep cultural and political divides that existed in 1925,” she says, “but it also captures very strongly the cultural and political divide that we are living in right now.”