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Podcast Transcript
In 1925, a small-town Tennessee courtroom became the stage for one of the most famous trials in American history.
What began as a test case over a high school biology lesson turned into a national spectacle involving evolution, religion, modern science, and two of the greatest legal minds of the age.
Reporters, preachers, politicians, and curious onlookers descended on Dayton, Tennessee, as the country watched a cultural battle unfold.
Learn more about the Scopes Monkey Trial on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Scopes Trial of 1925, often called the “Monkey Trial,” was one of the most famous courtroom dramas in American history. At its center was a young Tennessee schoolteacher, John T. Scopes, who was accused of violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools.
But the trial was about much more than one teacher, one biology lesson, or one Tennessee statute. It became a national debate over science, religion, modernity, free speech, education, and who had the authority to define truth in American public life.
The background of the trial lies in the cultural upheaval of the 1920s. After World War I, the United States was changing rapidly. Cities were growing, automobiles and radios were transforming everyday life, and new scientific ideas were reshaping how many Americans understood the world.
At the same time, millions of Americans, especially in rural and small-town areas, felt that traditional values were under attack. The 1920s were not simply the “Jazz Age”; they were also a decade of Prohibition, religious revival, and cultural conflict.
One of the central flashpoints was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, but by the early twentieth century, evolutionary theory had become increasingly common in high school and college textbooks.
Many religious people saw this as a direct challenge to the biblical account of creation, especially the idea that human beings were created separately and specially by God. For them, evolution was not just a scientific theory; it was a moral and spiritual threat.
The application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to human beings was originally outside of Darwin’s published works. Other biologists and philosophers began to link similarities in human skeletal structure to those of other species, including primates. Thomas Huxley, a close ally of Darwin, proposed a biological link between humans and primates based on skeletal and cranial structures.
Changes in scientific thinking contributed to the tension between modernists and traditionalists in American Protestantism. To traditionalists who embraced a literal interpretation of the Bible, these new scientific teachings were antithetical to the Creation Story in Genesis
.
One of the leaders of the traditionalist movement was William Jennings Bryan, the three time Democratic Party nominee for President. He framed the traditionalist perspective when he said: The evolution that is harmful—distinctly so—is the evolution that destroys man’s family tree as taught by the Bible and makes him a descendant of the lower forms of life.
Many southern states, home to large numbers of fundamentalists, quickly passed laws to prevent the teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools. Tennessee was the first state to pass a law making it illegal to teach evolution with the Butler Act.
The Butler Act imposed fines on teachers who taught evolution. The act made illegal: any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and teaches instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
Tennessee’s governor, Austin Peay, a moderate, saw no application for the legislation when he signed it. Peay needed to appease the traditionalist factions in government while acknowledging that the law would likely never be needed.
He had a strange ally in his fight to make the law strictly symbolic: William Jennings Bryan. The staunch creationist openly lobbied Tennessee’s legislature to remove any consequences from the law and to keep it strictly symbolic.
The newly formed American Civil Liberties Union, or the ACLU, took offense to this restriction on speech. Founded in 1920, the ACLU was created as a response to the Espionage and Sedition Acts during WWI, and from the controversial Schenck v. US, “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” case.
In 1925, the ACLU financed a test case against Tennessee’s Butler Act, arguing that the anti-evolution law violated both the First Amendment’s establishment of religion clause and free speech protections.
Before the Supreme Court’s landmark Gitlow v. New York decision in 1925, the protections of the Bill of Rights applied exclusively to the federal government, leaving state and local governments largely unchecked.
The Gitlow ruling fundamentally shifted American law by declaring that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause also protected citizens against state-level infringements on speech.
To challenge the law, the ACLU had to find someone to break it, which they found in John T. Scopes, a general science and algebra teacher at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee.
The well-liked Scopes was actually just a substitute teacher for 2 weeks in a colleague’s biology class and testified that he had taught Darwinian evolution.
Contrary to popular belief, Scopes was not arrested, handcuffed, or fingerprinted. The ordinance he violated was a misdemeanor, and the only punishment was a fine.
The test case and the resulting trial did not focus on Scopes’ innocence or guilt. In fact, no one questioned his actions; Scopes freely conceded the violation and paid a one-hundred-dollar fine. The issue was the law and Tennessee’s authority to pass it.
Dayton was a small community of 1,800 people in Eastern Tennessee. The town had not shown any interest in the issue before the agreement between Scopes and the ACLU. Nonetheless, tiny Dayton was about to become the center of the media universe.
Ironically, some business and community leaders were delighted about the news as they knew the attention would be a boon to the town’s tourism industry.
The court scheduled the trial quickly for July, just six weeks after the local constable cited Scopes.
The opposition to Mr. Scopes, including the preacher Billy Sunday, encouraged people to travel to Dayton to voice their opinions. East Coast urban media outlets encouraged their readers to travel to Dayton and declare their opposition to the Butler Act.
By the time the proceedings began, the street in front of the courthouse took on a circus-type atmosphere. There were hot-dog and soda vendors, cotton candy, musicians, and a wide assortment of interesting people. There were even vendors selling hamburgers rebranded as ‘monkey meat’.
One of the most interesting was Derek “Doc” Carter, a blind mountain man who resided in the Blue Ridge Mountains and, despite his disability, challenged anyone who dared to best him in biblical knowledge.
The trial created such a stir, that observers began to refer to it as the “Scopes Monkey Trial”, certainly for the evolutionary link, but also to the wild atmosphere outside the courtroom.
The case and its importance had electrified the nation. The streets of Dayton were filled with more than 200 reporters, as local hotels couldn’t accommodate the influx.
WGN, a radio station out of Chicago, dispatched a crew to provide live coverage of the scene. To facilitate the broadcast, the first trial in history to be aired over the radio, WGN invested $1,000 per day in long-distance phone lines, and links to its regional affiliates.
William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution. Bryan held such absolute conviction in his position that he offered a one-hundred-dollar reward to anyone in the crowd who would stand up and admit to being descended from an ape.
The ACLU countered by hiring the nation’s most famous trial lawyer, Chicago’s Clarence Darrow. Darrow, an agnostic, developed a reputation for defending the most controversial clients and winning their cases.
In his defense of Mr. Scopes, Darrow brought a group of prominent scientists and scholars to demonstrate that evolutionary biology did not contradict religion. However, the court denied Darrow the opportunity to call his expert witnesses.
Bryan and the prosecution argued that their opinion was irrelevant because the factual basis of evolution was not on trial; Scopes’ violation of the Butler Act of Tennessee was the issue at hand.
Denied his eleven witnesses, Darrow pulled off a brilliant maneuver; taking advantage of Bryan’s well-known vanity, he would question Bryan about The Bible, and then Bryan would question Darrow about evolution next.
Bryan’s co-counsel knew he had just walked into a trap; they urged him to reconsider, but he refused, arguing that the modernists were taking the lord out of schools.
Armed with a legendary reputation as a brilliant orator since his 1896 ‘Cross of Gold’ presidential campaign speech, Bryan was supremely confident he could best Darrow and restore traditionalist values in front of the national media gathered in Dayton.
Darrow peppered Bryan with questions about taking a literal interpretation of The Bible, specifically the Old Testament. In his questioning, Darrow targeted Biblical stories that he believed the authors intended as moral fables, rather than literal facts.
Had a fish actually swallowed Jonah and then three days later spat him alive back onto land?
Had the sun really stood still at Joshua’s command?
Was it true that all species of animals and human races that populated the earth existed because of Noah and his ark?
The questioning on the story of Jonah was perhaps the most revealing. When Darrow tried to trip him up by using the word ‘whale,’ Bryan sharply corrected him by noting the Bible text specifies a ‘big fish.’
When Darrow pushed further into the physical and scientific logistics of the miracle, Bryan abandoned textual nitpicking and retreated into absolute faith, declaring: I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man, and can make both do what He pleases.
As Darrow pushed both men deeper into the Old Testament, the conversation grew increasingly intense, culminating in outright hostility in the following exchange…
Bryan accused Darrow and his team of poor intentions, noting that it seemed their goal was: no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.
Darrow roared back: “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.”
Bryan was enraged by the questioning. The next morning was his turn to question Clarence Darrow, and he was motivated to press Darrow as hard as possible on the flaws of his secular worldview.
But that opportunity never came…
The next day, when Judge John T. Raulston brought the court back into session, Darrow stood up and abruptly ended the trial by conceding his client’s guilt: I think to save time, we will ask the court to bring in the jury and instruct the jury to find the defendant guilty.
With that, the trial was over. Darrow and his team knew Scopes was guilty, as he had admitted as much. They had simply used Bryan to diminish his own fundamentalist viewpoint in front of the world.
The fundamentalist view was the only one that ever had to defend itself on the stand, and, to a listening nation, it had failed to withstand Darrow’s logic.
Other than Clarence Darrow, who emerged from the trial with a reputation as a brilliant attorney, pretty much everyone else had lost. Judge Raulston, whose rulings had irritated both sides, was defeated in the next municipal election. John Scopes moved out of Tennessee, received a degree in geology, and worked in the oil industry.
William Jennings Bryan paid the steepest price. Already, infirm when the trial began and subjected to stress, heat, and exhaustion, he died of a stroke in his sleep only five days after the trial ended.
The state of Tennessee was eager to put the issue behind it and withdrew Scopes’ fine in 1927 on a technicality to avoid the possibility of repeal, noting: “We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.“
The Butler Act remained on the books in Tennessee for another 30 years.
The Scopes Trial ended with a guilty verdict, but its real importance was never the $100 fine imposed on John Scopes. It was a public confrontation over how science and religion would coexist.
Nearly a century later, Dayton, Tennessee, still stands as a symbol of a much larger national argument, one that has never fully gone away. The trial did not settle the debate over evolution, faith, and education, but it gave that debate its most famous stage.
