Scopes on Trial: Evolution vs. Religion in 1925

John T. Scopes was not even sure he had taught evolution. The 24-year-old high school football coach and substitute biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, agreed to be arrested on May 5, 1925, after a group of local businessmen recruited him as a test case to challenge the Butler Act, a new state law prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in public schools. The ensuing trial became the most famous courtroom spectacle in American history. The American Civil Liberties Union, founded just five years earlier, had placed newspaper advertisements seeking a Tennessee teacher willing to challenge the law. George Rappleyea, a Dayton mining manager, saw an opportunity to generate publicity for the struggling town. He persuaded Scopes, who had used a chapter on evolution from the state-approved textbook while substituting for the regular biology teacher, to volunteer as the defendant. The trial attracted the two most famous lawyers in America. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and a leader of the fundamentalist movement, joined the prosecution. Clarence Darrow, the nation's most celebrated defense attorney and an outspoken agnostic, represented Scopes. Over 200 newspaper reporters descended on Dayton, and the trial became one of the first to be broadcast by radio, reaching millions of listeners. The legal proceedings lasted eight days in July 1925. The judge barred expert testimony on evolution, limiting the defense's strategy. Darrow's most dramatic move was calling Bryan himself as a witness on the Bible, cross-examining him on the literal truth of scripture in a session conducted outdoors because of the heat. Bryan's halting answers damaged the fundamentalist cause in the court of public opinion, though Scopes was convicted and fined $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes's conviction on a technicality the following year, and the Butler Act remained on the books until 1967. Bryan died five days after the trial ended. The case established the cultural battle lines between science education and religious conservatism that persist in American public schools a century later.