Newsletter
On this day in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" begins with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee state law under the Butler Act 1925.
The law, which had been passed in March 1925, made it a misdemeanour punishable by a fine 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." In collaboration with local businessman George Rappalyea and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Scopes intentionally violated the law in the hopes of producing a test case ruling on the unconstitutionality of the Butler Act. After his arrest the pair enlisted the aid and finances of the ACLU to organise a defence.
Hearing of this coordinated attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the former Secretary of State, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. A staunch prohibitionist, a devout Presbyterian and a firm opponent of Darwinism, Bryan leapt at the chance to represent the World Christian Fundamentals Association at the Scopes trial.
Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU as lead counsel for the defence. Darrow was legendary on the labour and criminal legal circuit, participating in the McNamara brothers and the Leopold and Loeb trials prior to Scopes. He was a devoted opponent of the death penalty, a leading member of the ACLU, a confirmed agnostic, and an eloquent, witty and moving orator. The Scopes trial thus pitted two of the finest minds and tongues against each other, and very early on became Bryan v Darrow in the media and popular consciousness.
On 10 July, the Monkey Trial got under way, and within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton as preachers set up revival tents along the city's main street to keep the faithful stirred up. In the courtroom, Judge Raulston destroyed the defence's initial strategy – who argued that the Butler Act was unconstitutional because it benefited a particular religious group – by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated. The merits of the Butler Act were not to be examined. The next day, Raulston ordered the trial moved to the courthouse lawn, fearing that the weight of the crowd inside was in danger of collapsing the floor.
On the seventh day of the trial, in front of several thousand spectators in the open air, Darrow changed his tactics and called Bryan as his sole witness in an attempt to demonstrate that belief in the historicity of the Bible and its many accounts of miracles was unreasonable. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd.
On 21 July, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a ‘Guilty’ verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on 26 July, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up.
In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but ruled that the Butler Act was constitutional, a state of affairs that remained until 1967. A dismissed teacher complained that it violated his First Amendment right to free speech, and the Tennessee legislature, fearing a repeat of Scopes, repealed the Butler Act in 1967. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that prohibits the preferential treatment of a religious establishment.