The Scopes Trial

Tennessee passed the Butler Act in 1925, making it unlawful for a state-funded teacher to teach any theory denying the biblical account of creation and holding instead that man descended from a lower order of animals. The American Civil Liberties Union advertised for a teacher willing to be prosecuted so the law could be challenged, and businessmen in the small town of Dayton took up the offer, partly for the publicity. John Scopes, a young science teacher and part-time football coach, agreed to be the defendant, and was not certain he had actually taught the material.

The trial became a national spectacle. William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential candidate and the country's best-known populist, appeared for the prosecution; Clarence Darrow, the most famous defence lawyer in America, appeared for the defence. It was carried live on radio, and hundreds of reporters filled the town.

The famous moment came when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible and questioned him for two hours in the courthouse yard, drawing from him the admission that the days of creation might not have been twenty-four hours. The judge struck the testimony from the record the next day. Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars, and the conviction was set aside on appeal because the judge rather than the jury had set the fine.

Most of what the public knows about Scopes comes from a play written thirty years later and the film made from it, which used the trial as a vehicle for a commentary on the political conformity of its own decade. It is a good play and it is not a documentary. It invents characters, alters the sequence, makes the defendant a sympathetic prisoner rather than a volunteer, and gives the Bryan figure a humiliation and a death in the courtroom that did not occur, though Bryan did die in Dayton five days after the trial ended.

The historical record differs from the drama in ways that matter. The prosecution was not a mob of ignorant fundamentalists confronting reason; Bryan's opposition to evolution was tied to his opposition to the social Darwinism and eugenics being taught in the same textbooks, a connection the play has no room for. The defence's strategy of putting religion on trial was contested within its own team. And the outcome was not a defeat for the anti-evolution movement: the Butler Act stood until 1967, similar laws were passed elsewhere, and Edward Larson has shown that American textbook publishers quietly reduced their coverage of evolution for decades afterwards.

Both sides claimed victory at the time, which is the surest sign that the trial settled nothing, and the constitutional question was resolved only by later cases in the federal courts.