Remembering the Scopes “Monkey Trial”

The question of how to educate schoolchildren—and who should decide what they learn—has long been a contentious issue. Today, debate rages about returning more authority to states and local communities and limiting federal involvement in education. With the present controversy in mind, we may want to reflect on an event that unfolded 100 years ago, in the spring and summer of 1925.

The Background of Scopes vs Tennessee

It began when Tennessee’s Butler Act, passed in March of that year, forbade the state’s schools from teaching the theory of evolution. This made it illegal for publicly funded Tennessee schools “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.” It prescribed a fine of between $100 and $500 for anyone found guilty. However, one clear dilemma it posed for Tennessee’s biology teachers was that the state had previously mandated the use of a biology textbook—A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter—that plainly taught evolution!

The textbook praised what it called Charles Darwin’s “wonderful discovery of the doctrine of evolution” and proclaimed that Darwin “gave to the world the proofs of the theory on which we to-day base the progress of the world” (p. 405). Biology teachers were thus forced to choose either to follow the state’s curriculum and teach from a pro-evolution textbook, violating the Butler Act, or to obey the Butler Act and violate the state’s curricular laws. It is worth noting that Hunter’s textbook would be “canceled” today as both obsolete and offensive, as it attributed different racial groupings to evolution in action—topped by what it called “the highest type of all, the Caucasians” (p. 196). Today’s Bible-believing Christians agree that human beings are all members of one multifaceted species, with the races both united by common characteristics and distinguished by unique qualities, different but neither higher nor lower than one another.

It is easy to understand how Tennessee’s conflicting laws could lead to a court challenge. Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offered to provide support for someone willing to challenge the Butler act, and before long, civic leaders in the sleepy little town of Dayton, Tennessee, figured that the national publicity such a case would gain could help to revitalize their town—Dayton had dropped to a population of just 1,800 from a high of 3,000 in the late nineteenth century.

So, a young Dayton engineer named George Rappleyea asked a sympathetic acquaintance, John Scopes, a 24-year-old biology teacher at Rhea County High School, if he would be willing to become the defendant in a test case. With the help of prosecuting attorney Herbert Hicks—also a friend of Scopes—Scopes was charged with violating the Butler Act. Their plan was to have him found guilty so appeals of the decision could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, changing Tennessee law while bolstering Dayton’s economy.

The Development of the Case

Between Scopes’ May 9 arrest and the start of his trial on July 10, Dayton became a focus of international attention. Though the Scopes prosecution was launched as a test of conflicting legislation and motivated by the desire for the national spotlight on the community, there was strong public sentiment in favor of the Butler Act. Most people professed to believe in the Bible’s creation account.

And the presence of William Jennings Bryan as lead attorney for the prosecution only added to the case’s notoriety. Though he had not actively practiced law for decades at the time of the Scopes trial, Bryan was a national figure, having run for President of the U.S. three times. He had become a prominent Protestant religious speaker and one of the earliest to spread his message via radio, which is likely what drew him to the attention of the Scopes prosecution team. Bryan told The Chattanooga News on May 25, “The newspapers that have treated Tennessee law as a joke will find it no joking matter. Some legislatures and some courts have excluded the Bible from the schools. If a legislature can prohibit the reading of the Bible, can it not prohibit the teaching of a book that calls the Bible a lie?” Bryan felt that “the real issue in the Scopes case is not the teaching of evolution, but who shall control our schools and determine what shall be taught.”

High-profile attorney Clarence Darrow, a prominent member of the ACLU and an agnostic, agreed to represent Scopes. Early on, science fiction author H.G. Wells had been asked to defend Scopes, but he declined. Others sought to bring inventor Thomas Edison to Dayton to testify on behalf of evolution. As the Chattanooga Daily Times reported on July 11, “It is the hope of the Scopes defense representing modernism and science that Judge Raulston’s courtroom here will become the world’s largest schoolroom.” Some feared that the trial might literally become a circus when it was learned that Lillian Aurora, a popular stage performer known for her animal acts, offered to loan the defense “the educated movie picture chimpanzee” if they thought it might help their case.

Seeking to gain national attention for their cause, Scopes joined one of his defense attorneys, John Neal, on a tour of Washington, D.C., and other eastern cities in the days before the Dayton trial commenced. The trip saw Scopes visiting the original copy of the U.S. Constitution at the Library of Congress and posing in front of it for reporters and photographers for 15 minutes. During their trip, Scopes and Neal visited the Supreme Court chambers, commenting that their case might ultimately be resolved there.

Despite the risk of widespread ridicule, Dayton businessmen and civic leaders welcomed the trial, hoping it would bring an economic boost to the struggling small town. The Knoxville Journal reported on May 20 that many Dayton citizens complained about Chattanooga officials’ efforts to have the trial moved there and threatened to boycott Chattanooga businesses unless those efforts were dropped. However, the attention Scopes and Neal brought to tiny Dayton was not all positive, as the July 18 Chattanooga Daily Times quoted German playwright and novelist Herman Sudermann as saying, “The trial exposes America to the ridicule of the world.” Princeton geology professor William Scott called the trial “a most humiliating display at which the whole world is laughing.”

The Scopes Trial Itself—an Anti-Climax?

After so much publicity—local, national, and international—it is no surprise that the trial itself did not live up to many observers’ expectations. Though Bryan hoped to use the trial to attack evolutionary theory, and many of Scopes’ supporters saw the trial as a platform for promoting modern science, trial judge John Raulston dashed both sides’ hopes by excluding from the trial the expert testimony offered by evolutionist and creationist witnesses—it was read into the court record for the benefit of reporters, but played no part in the actual proceedings of the trial.

Without the battle of evolution vs. creation at its fore, observers lamented that the trial had become “one of mere formalities,” as both sides acknowledged that Scopes, by teaching from the state-approved textbook, had violated the Butler Act. Once the media circus was derailed, the case was simple. The jury took just nine minutes to find Scopes guilty, convening at 11:20 a.m. on the morning of July 21 and returning its verdict at 11:29 a.m. after five minutes of deliberation. Judge Raulston imposed a fine of $100, pending appeal of the case to the Supreme Court of Tennessee. The Chattanooga News that day called it “the world’s most famous misdemeanor case,” a case that “started as a law suit, turned into a circus, and developed into a battle of billingsgate [trash talk] between attorneys.”

Though the plaintiffs in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes were ready to take their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, that never happened. The Tennessee Supreme Court in January 1927 reversed Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. According to Tennessee law at the time, only a jury could impose a fine larger than $50, so Scopes’ judge-imposed fine of $100 was thrown out. There was no legal issue remaining to escalate to the federal courts.

The Aftermath

The Butler Act stayed on the books until May 1967, when the Tennessee legislature repealed it to avoid another similar court challenge that many feared would become an embarrassing international spectacle.

As for the economic benefit the trial brought to Dayton? The Chattanooga Daily Times on July 11 ran an article titled “Huge Crowds, Expected for Weeks, Fail to Put in Appearance,” reporting, “Of course, there are a few hundred there, and they are deeply interested, but for the most part their interest lies in trying to get the first news first, for they are newspaper reporters.” This was hardly the throng of tourists the city’s business community had hoped for—and most of the crowd was packed into the Rhea County courthouse, not enjoying the town’s amenities. Rhea County’s economy is estimated to have received a far greater boost from the solar eclipse in 2017, when Dayton was in the path of totality, than from the Scopes Trial! But it is fair to say that the Scopes Trial left an impact far more than economic.

One hundred years later, the facts of the Scopes case have largely faded from public memory, perhaps best remembered through the fictionalized lens of the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind and several subsequent television adaptations. And today, most evolutionists have largely abandoned the particulars of Darwin’s original theory, discarding it in favor of modernized alternatives. Yet the question of intelligent design vs. evolution remains a controversial topic. Evolutionary biologists now entertain theories that most thought ridiculous just a generation or two ago, such as panspermia—the idea that since there hasn’t been enough time for intelligent life to evolve on planet Earth, primitive life-forms must have arrived from outer space.

As for what Tennessee was teaching its biology students in 1925, we may want to reflect on one perceptive statement from A Civic Biology. We read, “Although anatomically there is a greater difference between the lowest type of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of ape and the lowest savage, yet there is an immense mental gap between monkey and man” (p. 195). Evolutionists marvel that while the DNA of chimpanzees and human beings is quite similar, varying according to some estimates by as little as 2 percent, the mental capacity of human beings is vastly greater. But while evolutionists are confounded, students of God’s word understand that God has put in human beings a “spirit in man” (Job 32:8) that sets mankind apart and makes us able to receive the Holy Spirit after baptism and laying on of hands (see this issue’s “Questions & Answers”).

Serious students of God’s word must consider: Is the theory of human evolution compatible with Scripture? Or is it an agenda-driven attempt to deny the plain truths of the world we see around us? To learn more, please read our powerful and informative study guide Evolution and Creation: What Both Sides Miss. You can order a free printed copy from either the Regional Office nearest you or TomorrowsWorld.org, where you can also read it online.