Scopes Trial

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SCOPES TRIAL

SCOPES TRIAL. Since the American public witnessed the dramatic testimony of William Jennings Bryan in the blistering heat of Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925, the Scopes Trial has come to represent the controversy over the teaching of evolutionary theories and Darwinism in the American public schools. John Scopes, a local biology teacher, agreed to serve as a defendant in an American Civil Liberties Union test case of Tennessee's antievolutionary law. He was arrested for teaching evolution and held for a jury trial in July of 1925. The issue at stake—whether the state could proscribe the teaching of any science that appeared to contradict the Bible—predated the trial and has remained a source of bitter controversy.

Since the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 and the Descent of Man in 1871, Charles Darwin's concepts of an ancient Earth and a gradual development of new species have been seen as particularly threatening by some groups of Christians, particularly in the United States. Seen to deny the story of Genesis and bolster a materialist interpretation of the appearance of life on Earth, evolution has become, for some important Protestant religious sects, symbolic of growing social disorder, immorality, and the decline of traditional culture in modern America.

The Scopes Trial occurred as a result of the Tennessee legislature's passage of the Butler Act in March 1925. The law, designed to prevent the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public schools, was not the first of its kind; Oklahoma had passed a similar statute in 1923, while several other states had considered doing so. This series of antievolutionary measures could be attributed in part to the activism of the former Populist leader, three-time presidential candidate, and former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan. After World War I Bryan had become a leader of the newly organized fundamentalist tendency in American Protestantism and a leading opponent of evolutionary theory, which he saw as an immoral science that had legitimated German ruthlessness during the war. Throughout the early 1920s he used his fame and rhetorical gifts to further the antievolutionary cause.

The forces that met and clashed in Dayton, Tennessee, were remarkably like those that have continued to debate the issue throughout the twentieth century. Both prosecution and defense decided to use the occasion to score larger points for their cause. Local prosecutors invited Bryan to join their case, while defense attorneys brought in the famed trial lawyer Clarence Darrow. A large group of reporters, as well as spectators from the local countryside, descended on the small town, and the proceedings were broadcast over WGN radio in Chicago.

The trial's most dramatic moment came when Bryan agreed to testify about the Biblical account of creation. In his testimony he revealed, to the consternation of many fundamentalists, his belief in the "day/age" theory, which interpreted the days referred to in the Biblical account of creation as metaphors for much larger ages. Bryan, the town of Dayton, and much of rural America were mocked in the urban press, led by the journalist H. L. Mencken, who attended the trial. But none of this mattered to the outcome of the proceedings, which established that Scopes had indeed broken the law. While the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction on appeal, it set aside the lower court's verdict on a technicality rather than on the merits of the case or the constitutionality of the law. The ACLU thus failed to establish the legal precedent against antievolutionary laws that it had sought.

The events of Dayton and the decline of efforts to outlaw evolution did not mean that evolution could be taught widely in American schools. In fact, after 1925 and well into the 1960s, most public school textbooks removed any mention of Darwin or evolution. Biblical literalists did not budge in their opposition to evolutionary science. But they did change their tactics. Rather than simply attacking evolution, they borrowed the language of science to present the Biblical story of creation in a new, more respectable guise. While this new "creation science" made no headway among established biologists and geologists, it proved convincing to many other Americans. With considerable public support, fundamentalists and creation scientists sought "equal time" to present their views in science classes. Focused first at a statewide and later at a local level, their agitation won temporary victories in the South, the Midwest, and California over the course of several decades. In 1987, however, a 7 to 2 ruling by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard rejected the equal time proposal and judged mandatory creation science to be an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into public schools.

The Supreme Court's powerful and far-reaching opinion notwithstanding, creation science has continued to win approval from many Americans, while the teaching of evolution and its mechanisms has lagged in the public schools. For example, in 1999 the Kansas Board of Education, by a narrow majority, approved a new science curriculum that eliminated the required teaching of evolutionary theory. Although the ruling was rescinded in early 2001, it does not appear that threats to American science education will disappear anytime soon.