John Scopes Found Guilty - July 21, 1925

John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution on this day in 1925.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July one today.
In five John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution
in Dayton, Tennessee. Here is how a lot of people
imagine this story. It's a small town in the nineteen twenties.
A science teacher defies all the community norms and teaches
a class on evolution. And then a student, usually imagined

(00:28):
as a girl, tearfully says during class that the learning
this is against her religion. And then she goes home
and confesses to a parent that she has learned something
offensive or sacrilegious in school. And then her outraged father
it's usually her father goes to the principle or the
school board or the police. The teacher is arrested and

(00:48):
put on trial. That is not how this happened at all.
Charles Darwin's theories of evolution were more than fifty years
old at this point. They had made their way into
lots of standard by alogy textbooks, such as the nineteen
fourteen edition of A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, which
was the one that was being used in Dayton, Tennessee,

(01:09):
and at the same time, more and more school systems
were standardizing their educational policies and their school curricula. These
two things happening at the same time. We're also going
on at the same time as a rise in Christian fundamentalism,
So all of this was happening simultaneously, and a lot
of Christian fundamentalists objected to Charles Darwin's writing on evolution.

(01:33):
Some of this was because it just contradicted the creation
story in the Christian Bible, but there were also objections
to the idea that people came from monkeys. To be clear,
that is not how Darwin described evolution. He did not
write that people came from monkeys. That was a mischaracterization
of his work. But in the face of this simultaneous

(01:55):
standardization of schools and rise in fundamentalism, a lot of
eights started banning the teaching of evolution. Florida and Oklahoma
passed laws that were related to the issue in nine
and then Tennessee explicitly outlawed it in nine in legislation
called the Butler Act. The Butler Act made it illegal

(02:16):
to quote teach any theory that denies the story of
the divine creation of ban as taught in the Bible,
and to teach instead that man has descended from a
lower order of animals. So this law got the attention
of the American Civil Liberties Union, or the a c
l U. They ran an ad in a Chattanooga newspaper
on May four saying they were looking for a test case.

(02:39):
They offered to publicly defend any teacher who was charged
with the teaching of evolution, and at this point a
bunch of community leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, population eighteen hundred,
thought this might be a good chance to bring some
much needed tourism to their town. They approached teacher John
Thomas Scopes, who was a relative newcomer to the town,

(03:01):
and he said he had probably taught some evolution when
he was substituting for a biology teacher during a recent
exam review. So he was arrested and indicted, and the
town got ready to host a bunch of news media
and visitors this These visitors, some of them were very
high profile. They included Clarence Darrow, one of the most

(03:22):
famous attorneys in the country, and Arthur Garfield Hayes of
New York, who was the a c o used General counsel.
They were both on the defense and then the prosecution
included William Jennings Bryan, who had run for president three
times and served as a Secretary of State. They seriously
got ready for a media onslaught. They built a tourist camp.
They updated the courthouse to accommodate more media people, including

(03:45):
adding camera platforms and places for microphones. The town formed
a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee, businesses sort of hanging up
pictures of monkeys in their windows selling monkey themed products.
The trial itself it out before a packed courtroom and
eventually had to be moved outside because of cracks that
were forming in the ceiling. And then, in a bizarre

(04:07):
turn of events, Clarence Darrow put defense attorney William Jennings
Brian on the stand and then I asked him a
bunch of like leading trick you questions, He asked, the
kind of bad faith questions that people on the internet asked.
Is kind of a gotcha. And then afterward the press
lampooned Brian. He actually died in his sleep five days

(04:30):
after the trial was over. The media lampooned the town
of Dayton as well. But even so, even with all
of this fun making in the press, numerous other states
started introducing laws banning the teaching of evolution after this
is over, and if you passed them. The Butler Act
actually stayed on the books in Tennessee until seven and

(04:51):
then court cases related to whether any of this is
constitutional have also been making their way through the courts
for decades. Every time the court comes to an census
on one issue, another approach will filter into the mix
and make its way through the courts again. You can
learn more about the Scopes trial and some of these
other cases that followed it on the episode of Stuff

(05:13):
You Miss in History Class, and you can subscribe to
the Stay in History Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
and whatever else you get your podcasts. Next up, we
will have a medical breakthrough and some debate about who
should get the credit for it