The Scopes Trial: The Hottest Court Battle of the 20th Century

John Thomas Scopes was your quintessential math and science teacher of the 1920s. He had round glasses and a serious demeanor and wore a skimmer hat, sometimes perched rakishly on one side of his head.

He wasn’t necessarily an amazing mathematician or scientist. He taught high school in Dayton, Tennessee, a dying town whose population had dwindled from 3,000 to 1,800 by 1925. He may not have been brilliant, but he was incidentally caught in the most publicized court battle of the 20th century. (READ MORE: Democrats’ Insidious Assault on ‘Our Democracy’)

In the summer of 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union approached Scopes and asked if he had ever taught the theory of evolution. He didn’t remember — but he did know that he had used a state-issued science textbook by George William Hunter, which included a brief description of evolution. It wasn’t much, but the ACLU ran with it.

And, of course, there was the dying town and its officials. Dayton was barely more than a speck on the map. The opportunity to become known meant that the whole town — judge, mayor, lawyers, teachers, and kids — was eager to make the event the spectacle of the century. But as H.L. Mencken later pointed out in his coverage for the Boston Globe, they quickly discovered that a “monkey trial” (Mencken’s term) wasn’t the ideal way to make it on the map.

In March 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, named after state Rep. John Butler. The act prohibited public schools from teaching evolution, arguing that it was an anti-Christian hypothesis. Tennessee Gov. Austin Peay signed the bill to gain rural votes, believing no one would enforce it.

But the ACLU had other ideas. They forced the issue and convinced a jury to convict Scopes of violating the act. On July 10, 1925, the case went before a judge. Originally the ACLU had planned to make the case about freedom of speech and individual rights on behalf of teachers — but Clarence Darrow, who offered to defend Scopes, chose a slightly different line of reasoning.

Darrow, an agnostic, argued that the Bible and evolution had nothing to do with one another. Theology, he claimed, should talk about theological things, and science should discuss evolution: There was no reason for the two to intertwine.

The problem with the Scopes trial was that Darrow’s opponent, Williams Jennings Bryan, was a bumbling fool — a fool who quickly came to represent evangelical Christianity. It was a dishonest representation since most of America’s foremost geologists were Christians and included figures like Edward Hitchcock and Charles Dolittle Walcott.

We are usually taught that the Scopes trial was, in some sense, a victory for glorious science in the face of bumbling and superstitious religion. Technically the ACLU lost, and Bryan won. Scopes was found guilty and ordered to pay $100 — which he never did.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on July 9, 2023.

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