Scopes Monkey Trial
One of the most sensational court cases in twentieth century America, the Scopes Monkey Trial went infinitely beyond the boundaries of law and the courtroom to question the social, intellectual, and cultural values of America. The explosive and passionate conflicts instigated by the arguments in the case of the State of Tennessee vs. public schoolteacher John T. Scopes in 1925 characterized the decade in which they took place. On one side stood those who emphasized secularism, science, new ideas and theories, and individual self-expression; on the other side stood religious dogma and traditionalism. Thus, there was a bitter division between those Americans who wanted change, and the many others who clung to repressive notions of conformity, moral purity, and order.
The battleground for this conflict between new and old ideas was the public school system within which John Scopes taught Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which contradicted the Bible's interpretation of the origins of man. Although by the 1920s, Darwin's principles were being taught in most American universities and public schools, the middle of the decade brought a concerted drive by religious fundamentalists to stop the teaching of evolution in the schools. School boards, individual schools, and many states in the South prohibited the teachings in public schools of any theory about the origins of human life that conflicted with the teachings of the Bible.
In 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that it was willing to financially support anyone challenging a recently enacted Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching of Darwin in the state's schools. John T. Scopes, a 25-year-old high-school science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who taught evolution in his school biology class, accepted the ACLU offer and agreed to stand as the defendant in a test case to challenge the law. On the initiative ofScopes' friend George Rappelyea, the teacher was reported to the police for breaking the new law, arrested, and sent for trial. A number of prominent legal counselors, led by the famous liberal trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, undertook the defense of Scopes. The prosecuting attorney was William Jennings Bryan, former Secretary of State, three-time Democratic candidate for president, one time Populist, and now a leader of the new fundamentalist movement in Christianity.
In the courtroom at the Scopes Monkey Trial.During the summer of 1925 the Scopes Monkey Trial grabbed national and international headlines. Almost a thousand people packed the Tennessee courtroom daily, and millions more listened to the proceedings—it was the first trial ever to be broadcast live on the radio. Judge John T. Raulston, a conservative Christian who started each day's court proceedings with a prayer, did not allow the defense to bring any expert scientific testimony about evolution. As a result, Darrow called prosecuting attorney Bryan, an expert on science and religion, as his only witness, and systematically proceeded to humiliate him. With his probing questions, Darrow led Bryan to declare that a big fish had swallowed Jonah, that Eve was literally created from a piece of Adam's rib, and that in 2348 B.C. the world was flooded and fish and animals escaped onto Noah's ark. The press mocked Bryan's literal interpretation of the Bible, thus undermining the fundamentalist cause.
At the conclusion of the hearings, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court where, he hoped, the anti-Darwin law would be overturned. The jury, complying with Darrow's request, returned a verdict of guilty and Judge Raulston fined Scopes $100. Publicly humiliated and exhausted, Bryan died just a few days after the trial. A year later, however, the decision of the Dayton court was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality.
Although Scopes was convicted, and the existing anti-evolution law remained on the Tennessee statute books, many Americans perceived the religious fundamentalist cause as the loser in the trial. The existing statutes banning Darwin's theories were never enforced and evolution continued to be taught in the schools. Moreover, the need for the separation of theology from general education became even more firmly entrenched in the minds of many Americans. Everywhere, prayer and other religious activities were eventually abolished in the public schools.
The Scopes Monkey Trial, wearing only the thinnest of disguises in that the names of the place and the protagonists were changed, became the subject of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's successful Broadway play Inherit the Wind (1956), which was turned into a film in 1960 with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March as Darrow and Bryan, respectively.
Further Reading:
Conkin, Paul K. When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals. Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
Furnis, Norman F. The Fundamentalist Controversy. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954.
Hansen, Ellen. Evolution on Trial. Lowell, Massachusetts, Discover Enterprises, 1994.
Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York, Basic Books, 1997.
The World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case(complete record of trial). Cincinnati, National Book Co., 1925; Union, New Jersey, Lawbook Exchange, 1997.
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