On July 10, 1925, the trial of Tennessee high school teacher John T. Scopes began in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes was charged with teaching the theory of evolution, in violation of a recently passed state law.
The law was the Butler Act, which prohibited teachers from teaching evolution or denying creationism as spelled out in the Bible. Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signed the act into law in March 1925, hoping to gain support from rural voters and legislators; he later said that he never expected the law to actually be enforced.
The American Civil Liberties Union wanted to challenge the law and offered to fund the defense of anyone charged with violating it. Civic leaders in the town of Dayton thought that a trial would be a good thing for the town; they expected it to be a national news story, and the flood of reporters from out of town would generate publicity and tourism for Dayton.
And so, John Scopes agreed to admit teaching evolution. He couldn’t remember whether he’d actually done so; he’d only taught the biology class for a few days as a substitute. But the state-required textbook did explicitly describe the theory of evolution, and Scopes thought that he had mentioned it during one class. The fact that teaching from the required textbook would oblige teachers to violate the Butler Act doesn’t seem to have come up during discussion of the new law.
Scopes encouraged his students to testify against him, even coaching them on how to answer questions. Three students testified before the grand jury, and Scopes was indicted on May 25.
The Dayton prosecutors invited William Jennings Bryan to join their team. Bryan had been a three-time presidential nominee and served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. At the time of the trial, he devoted most of his time to religious speaking, campaigning particularly hard against the theory of evolution. Bryan hadn’t tried a case in more than thirty years, but he eagerly accepted the chance to be involved with Scopes’s trial.
In response, the defense invited Clarence Darrow to join them. Darrow was one of the most famous criminal lawyers of the early 20th century and had spoken often about being an agnostic. He was initially reluctant to get involved, but eventually agreed, after realizing that the case would be a media circus with or without him.
And indeed it was. The Scopes trial was the first trial to be nationally broadcast on radio, and newspapers from across the country sent reporters to cover it. Among the most notable of those journalists was H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun, a writer with a vicious wit whose reports sharply mocked the anti-evolution view.
Mencken’s reports from Dayton are collected in A Religious Orgy in Tennessee.
Darrow’s strategy was to argue that there is no conflict between the theory of evolution and Biblical creation. To that end, he wanted to call several Biblical scholars as witnesses, but judge John Raulston refused to allow their testimony. He allowed them only to submit written statements and ultimately ruled that even those statements were irrelevant. The jury, Raulston ordered, was not allowed to consider the merits of the Butler Act, only whether the Act had been violated.
As a last resort, Darrow asked to call Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert. For the defense attorney to call one of the prosecuting attorneys as a witness was, to say the least, an unorthodox idea, but Bryan agreed to take the stand with the understanding that he would be allowed in exchange to question Darrow.
Darrow questioned Bryan for two hours, pointing out various Biblical paradoxes and unexplained mysteries. If God created Adam and Eve, then where did Cain’s wife come from, Darrow asked; Bryan responded that he would “leave the agnostics to hunt for her.” The questioning was interrupted when the court adjourned for the day. The next morning, Raulston declared the entire line of questioning to be irrelevant and ordered the jury to disregard it.
The jury deliberated for nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty, and Raulston fined him $100, the minimum allowed under the Butler Act. Scopes’s lawyers appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which rejected all of their legal arguments but set aside the conviction on a technicality. The fine, they said, should have been imposed by the jury, because Tennessee law allowed judges to impose fines of no more than $50. The Court also recommended that the state would be better off letting the matter drop, and the Attorney General did choose not to seek a retrial.
The Scopes trial made evolution a bigger political issue than it had been. In the two years following the trial, thirteen state legislatures debated anti-evolution laws, though they passed only in Arkansas and Mississippi. Tennessee repealed the Butler Act in 1967, and in a 1968 case from Arkansas, the United States Supreme Court ruled that such laws were unconstitutional.
The Rhead County Courthouse, where the trial took place was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
The trial’s greatest impact on popular culture came from the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. It was very loosely based on the trial, with many alterations and inventions of events, and fictionalized versions of Darrow, Bryan, and Mencken as its main characters. The play ran for two years on Broadway and has returned to Broadway in two revivals. It’s been filmed several times, including a 1960 theatrical version starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly; a 1988 TV movie with Jason Robards, Kirk Douglas, and Darren McGavin; and a 1999 TV movie featuring Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, and Beau Bridges.
Peter Goodchild’s 1993 play The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial attempts a more accurate depiction, based on transcripts and contemporary reporting. It was produced in audio format by Los Angeles Theatre Works.
Edward J. Larson’s book on the trial, Summer for the Gods, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History; John A. Farrell is the author of the biography Clarence Darrow.
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