Scopes Trial

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Scopes Trial

The dramatic Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925 involved the prosecution of high school science teacher John T. Scopes (1900–1970) for violating Tennessee’s Butler Law, outlawing the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools. The trial was one of American history’s landmark courtroom battles and a watershed in what came to be widely understood as a cresting conflict between science and religion.

The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 was taken by many as a radical challenge to the Biblical accounts of humankind’s origin. In the ensuing years, revolutionary advances in science and technology, increasing urbanization, and the growth of religious pluralism fed by mass immigration, buoyed both the self-confidence of science and the appeal of a secular public sphere. Evolutionary theory was applied to social relations to justify the laissez-faire (or hands-off) policies and economic inequalities of the Gilded Age (which many Christians condemned) as naturally occurring instances of the survival of the fittest. Prominent public thinkers increasingly argued that religion was dogmatic, superstitious, and impeded the scientific spirit essential to a more enlightened modernity. The 1920s, however, witnessed a revival of Fundamentalist Protestantism, aimed at fighting these trends, and many of the ideas—like evolution—that undergirded them by undermining the authority of Scripture. Part of the Fundamentalist counterattack involved state-level efforts to outlaw the teaching of Darwinian theory to public school children.

The Scopes trial was self-consciously conceived as a theatrical staging of these broad-ranging social debates. Tennessee’s Butler Law was passed largely as a statement of principle. Few of its proponents either intended or expected that it would be aggressively enforced. The proponents of evolutionary theory, scientific investigation, academic freedom, and secular education (including the American Civil Liberties Union) actively recruited John Scopes, a general science teacher substituting as a biology teacher, to admit to having violated the law by teaching a lesson in evolution. They did so in full collusion with local town officials in Dayton, Tennessee (including the prosecutor), who hoped a dramatic public spectacle pitting the claims of science against religion would revive the economic fortunes of the ailing southern town. The town officials bore no ill will toward Scopes, who swam with the opposing side’s lawyers during trial recesses. It was understood that, if convicted, Scopes would serve no jail time, but instead pay a fine generously provided by others. The prosecution and defense teams recruited two of the country’s most famous lawyers to square off on behalf of science on one hand and the Bible on the other—the radical Chicago attorney (and proud atheist) Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) and the Populist evangelical former presidential candidate and secretary of state William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), respectively. The trial was conducted in a carnival-like swirl of hot-dog and lemonade hawkers, souvenir vendors, and street-corner orators. The proceedings were broadcast live from Chicago on WGN radio and charted by swarms of reporters, including the celebrated American journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). The sparring between the two lawyers, including Darrow’s withering cross-examination of Bryan (who mounted the stand himself as an expert on biblical teaching) became the stuff of legend. Although the jury convicted Scopes, the consensus was that Darrow had effectively humiliated the creationists, striking a powerful blow for science and academic freedom. Many have held the trial’s grueling ordeal responsible for Bryan’s death only days after the verdict, as well as for the ensuing retreat of many fundamentalist Protestants from the nation’s public life.

In subsequent years the Scopes trial retained a rich resonance as a symbol of the dangers of not only religious zealotry, but of religion in general, to the advancement of knowledge and intellectual freedom. These symbolic uses were evident in accounts of it in the most prominent cold war era American history textbooks and, most famously, in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play, Inherit the Wind (and its 1960 film adaptation by Stanley Kramer), which took dramatic liberties with real events by building up the depth of John Scopes’s commitment to evolutionary theory and academic freedom and the ruthlessness and intolerance of the Dayton townspeople and prosecutors. These reconstructed memories were prominent in the culture at precisely the moment in the early 1960s that the U.S. Supreme Court held—in a run of Establishment Clause cases invalidating Bible reading and prayer in the schools—that the Constitution imposed a “high and impregnable” “wall of separation” between church and state. As evangelical and fundamentalist Christians became newly active in politics in the 1980s (in part in reaction to these judicial rulings) and as a new generation of critics of evolutionary theory and proponents of creationism and “intelligent design” gained influence, the meaning and legacy of the Scopes Trial are being reconsidered once again.

SEE ALSO Christianity; Church and State; Civil Liberties; Creationism; Cross of Gold; Darwin, Charles; Fundamentalism, Christian; Populism; Science