The Charge

In March 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, making it unlawful for any teacher in a state-funded school 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.” The law passed easily; Governor Austin Peay signed it while privately doubting it would ever be enforced.

The American Civil Liberties Union, founded five years earlier, immediately offered to defend any teacher willing to test the law. The town of Dayton, Tennessee, population around 1,800, saw an opportunity. A group of local businessmen — not all of them anti-evolutionists — thought a high-profile trial might bring attention and business to their declining community. They recruited John Thomas Scopes, a 24-year-old general science teacher and football coach who had substituted in a biology class and may or may not have actually taught from the chapter on evolution in the state-approved textbook. Scopes himself was not entirely sure whether he had broken the law, but he was willing to be the defendant.

The trial that resulted was not a careful proceeding designed to test a constitutional principle; it was, from the beginning, a spectacle. H.L. Mencken, covering it for the Baltimore Sun, set the tone for national media coverage: scathing, contemptuous of Tennessee and its values, certain of the verdict of history. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential nominee, secretary of state under Wilson, and the most famous progressive politician of his generation, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense attorney in the country, volunteered for the defense. The ACLU had hoped for a different kind of proceeding; with Darrow involved, it was going to be a fight.

The Proceedings

The trial opened on July 10, 1925, in a courtroom so crowded that proceedings were moved outdoors to the courthouse lawn. The legal question was simple: had Scopes violated the Butler Act? It was not in serious dispute that he had, or at least that the state could make that case. The defense’s strategy was to argue that the law was unconstitutional — a violation of the establishment clause, of academic freedom, of the separation of church and state — and to use the proceedings to put evolutionary science before the public, with expert witnesses explaining and endorsing it. The judge, John Raulston, excluded the scientific testimony. The defense had no case within the narrow legal parameters of the trial.

The moment that defines the trial’s place in history came on the seventh day. Darrow called Bryan as a witness — as an expert on the Bible — and Bryan, fatally, agreed. In a two-hour examination conducted outdoors in the heat, Darrow forced Bryan to defend a literal reading of Scripture: the whale that swallowed Jonah, the sun standing still for Joshua, the age of the Earth implied by Biblical genealogies. Bryan hedged, conceded, contradicted himself. He acknowledged that “day” in Genesis might not mean a 24-hour day. He held that the Earth was perhaps millions of years old. He was confused, defensive, and visibly diminished. Mencken’s dispatches hammered the point: this was what stood against Darwin.

Bryan died five days after the trial ended. Whether the examination had anything to do with it is uncertain; he was old and diabetic. But the cultural memory of the trial fixed his defeat in that outdoor examination as the decisive moment.

The Outcome

Scopes was convicted and fined $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the conviction on a technicality — the jury, not the judge, should have set the fine — without ruling on the constitutional question. The Butler Act remained law until 1967. The ACLU never got the test case it wanted.

What the trial produced was cultural rather than legal: a dominant narrative in which the prosecution of Scopes represented rural ignorance facing down urban science, and in which the verdict of history was never in doubt. This narrative was consolidated and amplified by the 1955 play “Inherit the Wind” and its 1960 film adaptation, which fictionalized the trial into a clear-cut struggle for intellectual freedom. The fictionalization was significant and not entirely honest: the real Bryan was more complicated than the play’s Bradlee, and the real Scopes less heroic than the play’s Drummond. But the narrative stuck.

What it Teaches

The Scopes trial teaches several things, not all of them comfortable for the side that history has favored.

The trial revealed how poorly the legal system handles questions about what should be taught in public schools — questions that involve genuine conflicts of values, not just facts. The Butler Act was a bad law, but the political process that produced it was not simply ignorant. Bryan’s concern — that public schools funded by taxpayers with religious convictions were teaching those taxpayers’ children that their beliefs were scientifically discredited — was a real political concern about the relationship between democratic authority and publicly funded institutions. His answer (ban the teaching) was wrong, but the underlying tension has not gone away.

The trial also reveals how cultural victories can be more complete and more durable than legal ones, and how the framing of an intellectual conflict matters as much as the substance. Darrow did not win in court; he won in Mencken’s dispatches, in the national press, and eventually in Hollywood. The anti-evolution movement was associated, after 1925, with a specific image of rural backwardness that it has never fully shed. Whether this association was entirely fair is a separate question from whether it was politically effective.

The conflict the trial represents — between scientific consensus and religious conviction in the context of public education — has recurred in every decade since: in arguments about textbook disclaimers, about teaching “intelligent design,” about the inclusion of creationism as an alternative “theory.” The legal questions have been largely settled, in favor of science. The cultural and political questions have not. The Butler Act is gone; the argument it represented is not.