In the summer of 1925, journalists, lawyers, and gawkers alike descended upon Dayton, Tennessee, population 1,800, to witness the unfolding of what was to become one of the most famous episodes in the ongoing conflict between science and religion.
It was oppressively hot and muggy, but that didn’t hamper the carnival atmosphere. Street vendors hawked lemonade, iced tea, and cheap souvenirs. Christian groups held open-air prayer meetings while a circus chimpanzee strolled the streets wearing a suit and swinging a cane.
The event that brought the world to Dayton that summer has been called the trial of the century. American journalist H. L. Mencken dubbed it the “Monkey Trial.” The facts are these: A high school science teacher, John Scopes, was being tried for violating the Butler Act, a recently passed Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. You might imagine a burly sheriff dragging Scopes from the classroom in handcuffs. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Scopes volunteered to be arrested.
The American Civil Liberties Union heard about the Tennessee law and offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone who would get themselves arrested and challenge the law in court. The idea was to get the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping for a favorable ruling on the issue of separation of church and state. A group of local business leaders decided that Dayton could use the publicity. Scopes agreed to become the defendant.
The trial might have attracted little attention outside the world of constitutional law were it not for the two famous lawyers who volunteered to help with the case: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense.
Two Crusaders
Bryan, known as “The Great Commoner” for his efforts on behalf of working people, was a three-time Democratic candidate for U.S. President and a former Secretary of State. Darrow was then, and is still, considered one of the greatest defense attorneys in the history of the U.S.
Both men were politically progressive. Bryan supported women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, and the right of unions to strike. Darrow held similar positions and, in addition had represented unions and the NAACP.
The two men could not have been more different philosophically, however. Darrow was an avowed agnostic who believed passionately in freedom of speech and thought and in the value of reason. Bryan was a fundamentalist Christian who believed in a literal interpretation of the King James Bible. Bryan had spent the last ten years crusading against the teaching of evolution.
But the Scopes trial was never about evolution, not really. For Bryan, it was about religion.
“Bryan felt that he was going into a duel to the death on behalf of Christianity. He really believed that he was a modern Crusader,” explains Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation.
For Darrow, Wineapple explains, the case was about protecting the freedom to learn, to teach, to think, and to worship (or not) as you please. Yet Darrow, too, she says, was on a crusade of a sort.
“Darrow felt that he'd seen too much intolerance, too much racism, too much xenophobia, too much prejudice,” Wineapple says. For both men, America was on the line.
Read More: 7 Things You May Not Know About Charles Darwin
National Biology Lesson
At the time, few people outside science, least of all Bryan, truly understood evolution or the writings of Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, Bryan and most of his followers confused evolution with social Darwinism, a misunderstanding and misapplication of Darwin’s theories that were used to justify racism, imperialism, and eugenics.
For his part, Darrow aimed to educate people. That plan came to a head late in the trial when, after the judge had refused to allow expert witnesses to testify about the science of evolution, Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand.
Darrow asked Bryan about the age of the Earth, about biblical miracles, such as when Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and many more questions that revealed not only Bryan’s ignorance of science but his ignorance of the Bible as well.
“This was intended, I think, to expose Bryan’s ideas about creationism as silly and unsupported, but you almost get the sense that Darrow was trying to humiliate him,” says Douglas O. Linder, a law professor at the University of Kansas-Missouri School of Law and founder of the website Famous Trials.
And the press did see it as a humiliation. Bryan was “near hysterics” and “intellectually butchered,” according to journalists cited by Wineapple.
However, the jury’s job was not to decide the merits of Bryan’s beliefs but to determine if John Scopes had violated the Butler Act, and that was never really in dispute. It took the jury all of nine minutes to return a guilty verdict. The case was headed to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
However, the appeal did not go as planned. The judges upheld the law, but reversed the verdict on a technicality (the judge had fined Scopes $100, but according to Tennessee law, any fine over $50 had to be decided by the jury). The defense’s request for a new trial was denied. The case would never make it to the Supreme Court.
According to Linder, you can see the outcome as a draw. He says, “the strategy of getting to the Supreme Court didn't work, but it did give Darrow an opportunity to give the nation a biology lesson.” The expert testimony that the jury didn’t hear was presented by affidavit and published in periodicals around the nation.
But perhaps the most tangible effect of the Scopes trial was that the circus atmosphere and national attention discouraged other states from enacting similar legislation, says Linder. Of the states that were considering banning the teaching of evolution, only two — Louisiana and Arkansas — actually passed such legislation. Arkansas’ ban made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, where it was ruled a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, reinforcing the separation of church and state and ending the movement to outlaw the teaching of evolution in the U.S.
Read More: How Does Speciation Drive Evolution?
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Brenda Wineapple. Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
Edward J. Larson. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion.
Douglas O. Linder. State v. John Scopes ("The Monkey Trial"): An Account
Clarence Darrow. The Story of My Life.
Britannica. H.L. Mencken
Tennessee Virtual Archive. Butler Act
American Civil Liberties Union. History
Office of the Historian. William Jennings Bryan
Britannica. Clarence Darrow
Britannica. Social Darwinism
Middle Tennessee University. Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)
Find Law. Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)
Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.
