Scopes Trial

The Scopes Trial, sometimes known as the "Scopes monkey trial," took place in Tennessee in 1925. It was engineered as a challenge to the state's Butler Act which prohibited public schools from teaching the fact of human evolution. The defendant was John T. Scopes (1900- 1970), a teacher who had volunteered for the challenge. Scopes was convicted, and the conviction was soon overturned on a technicality and never appealed. The trial was one of the most watched epsiodes in the history of American religious and American education. It was seen as a confrontation between modern science and Fundamentalism in its belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

The dramatic highlight of the trial was when famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow called prosecution lawyer William Jennings Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible.

The impetus for the Scopes trial began in a meeting among town leaders at a drugstore in Dayton, Tennessee, in response to a newspaper advertisement placed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offering to provide legal services to anyone willing to be prosecuted under the Butler Act.^[1] Town leaders agreed that a trial would provide publicity to the town,^[2] whose population had dwindled to 1,800.^[3] The town leaders found a willing defendant in John Scopes, a gym teacher and football coach who also substituted (sometimes as a biology teacher), though Scopes could not recall ever teaching evolution.^[4] John Scopes told the town leaders, "If you can prove that I've taught evolution and that I can qualify as a defendant, then I'll be willing to stand trial."

Fundamentalists took up the challenge, led by theologian William Bell Riley, who signed up Bryan to assist the local county prosecutor. The national media rushed to Dayton.

Racing other Tennessee towns, Judge John T. Raulston accelerated the convening of the grand jury and "...all but instructed the grand jury to indict Scopes, despite the meager evidence against him and the widely reported stories questioning whether the willing defendant had ever taught evolution in the classroom."^[5] He was indicted on May 25, after three students testified against Scopes at the Grand Jury, at Scopes' behest.^[6]

Darrow brought the Scopes case in the hopes of winning a public relations and legal victory. Historians agree that the publicity victory went to Darrow, but the prosecution won a legal victory in the trial when Scopes was convicted.

The ACLU challenged a Tennessee statute, the Butler Act, that imposed a fine for teaching in government schools that "man descended from more primitive life forms" (demonstrating the lawmakers' complete lack of understanding of evolution). The statute did not prohibit teaching most aspects of evolution. The textbook at issue in the case suggested indirectly (through a tree-like diagram) that "man descended from lower life forms".

Bryan attacked Darrow in court, noting how Darrow had previously claimed that murder defendants Leopold and Loeb were driven to crime by what they were taught, which was Nietzsche's atheistic philosophy. Bryan quoted Darrow as saying that "Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? ... The university would be more to blame than he is. ... Your honor, it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university."

Bryan was an extraordinary speaker, recognized to be among the best in American history. Darrow wanted to prevent Bryan from making a persuasive closing argument to the jury, and Darrow searched for another way to try to score points for his side.

So Darrow stunned the court by requesting to cross-examine Bryan, in the hope that Bryan, like many attorneys, would be a poor witness. Darrow's attempt was unprecedented, because trial attorneys almost never take the witness stand in their own cases. Bryan agreed.

A witness in a trial is always at a disadvantage on cross-examination, because he can only answer questions that are posed by a hostile adversary. On cross-examination, Attorneys are allowed to ask leading(yes or no) questions to force the desired response, unlike on direct examination. Attorneys are particularly vulnerable, because their knowledge of the law and tendency to speak in legalese hinder their performance.

Darrow successfully demonstrated the inherent silliness of creationism by challenging Bryan to fully explicate the position in any way acceptable to human reason. Of course, Bryan failed, although many of the weaker minded there thought that he had scored some form of victory through citing random passages of the Bible and glibly joking when cornered.

The conclusion

The next day, it was Darrow's turn to be cross-examined. But Darrow took the public by taking the unprecedented step of asking the jury for a guilty verdict against his client.^[7]

After 8 days of trial, and 9 minutes of deliberation, Scopes was found guilty on July 21 and ordered to pay a fine of $100. The conviction was overtuned on appeal by a technicality.^[8]

Bryan, a 65-year-old diabetic lacking in modern treatments, died peacefully in his sleep during his afternoon nap after church five days after the conclusion of the Scopes trial.^[9] Bryan's victory in the Scopes trial was a fitting end to a principled, illustrious career.^[10] Scopes never had to pay the fine - the judge had set the amount but Tennessee law at the time prohibited judges from setting fines over $50.

The law challenged by the ACLU in the Scopes Trial remained in effect for over 50 more years. In 1967, Tennessee repealed the Butler Act, and in 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, that such bans on teaching are unconstitutional if they are primarily religious in intent.

Tennessee continued to downplay evolution in its schools until 2005.^[11]

The trial gained renewed attention after it was dramatized for both stage (1955) and screen (1960). Titled Inherit the Wind, both dramatizations distorted the facts of the case and were promoted to harm Christianity.^[12][13]

The play Inherit the Wind, and the adapted movie, were fictional accounts of the Scopes Trial.^[14] Several modifications were made; characters names were changed, and many crucial facts were changed. The authors have said that the play was really an attempt to mock Senator Joseph McCarthy, and to equate anti-communism with anti-intellectualism.^[15] The movie featured the popular Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow, and even garnered a few Academy Award nominations.

The movie features an angry mob trying to lynch a jailed teacher; in fact, the ACLU ran advertisements with offers to pay expenses for a teacher to volunteer for the case, and Scopes was never jailed and never paid even a fine.

The movie version heaped mockery on any argument that teaching evolution could be socially harmful.

The movie portrayed the character based on Bryan as a complete buffoon. Bryan's death was also portrayed as happening in the courthouse, when in fact he was an elderly man suffering from diabetes who died peacefully in his sleep.

American history books correctly describe this case as a major defeat for Fundamentalists.^[16]

1. ↑ Larson 2006, Linder 2002. See also Coulter 2006
2. ↑ Larson 2006
3. ↑ Linder 2002
4. ↑ Larson 2006. See also Coulter 2006
5. ↑ Larson 2006, p. 108
6. ↑ Larson 2006, p. 89, 107
7. ↑ http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/day8.htm
8. ↑ The Tennessee Constitution had a clause that any fine that high must be set by a jury, not by the judge. The state's Supreme Court vacated the verdict due to that, and then ruled that because Scopes no longer lived in the state, the case was moot.
9. ↑ Larson 2006, p. 199
10. ↑ http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/side/bryan.html
11. ↑ http://www.edexcellence.net/institute/publication/publication.cfm?id=352&pubsubid=1169#1169
12. ↑ "'Inherit the Wind' relentlessly distorts what happened in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925."[1]
13. ↑ As recently as April 17, 2007, the Village Voice endorsed a new Broadway rendition of Inherit the Wind as "a dramatization of the 1925 [Scopes] trial."[2]
14. ↑ http://www.themonkeytrial.com/
15. ↑ http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2005/07/08/07
16. ↑ The trial "marked a decisive setback for fundamentalism," says The Enduring Vision, Fifth Edition, Chapter 23: The 1920s: Coping with Change, Paul S. Boyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Carleton College; et al. (a commonly used American history textbook for Advanced Placement US History classes).

• Clark, Constance Areson. "Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, The Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate." Journal of American History 2000 87(4): 1275-1303. in JSTOR
• Conkin, Paul K. When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals. (1998). 185 pp.
• Coulter, Ann (2006), Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Crown Forum., ISBN 978-1400054206
• Edwards, Mark. "Rethinking the Failure of Fundamentalist Political Antievolutionism after 1925". Fides Et Historia 2000 32(2): 89-106. 0884-5379
• Folsom, Burton W., Jr. "The Scopes Trial Reconsidered." Continuity 1988 (12): 103-127. 0277-1446, by a leading conservative scholar
• Gatewood, Willard B., Jr., ed. Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, & Evolution (1969)
• Harding, Susan. "Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other." Social Research 1991 58(2): 373-393.
• Larson, Edward J. (2006), Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial And America's Continuing Debate over Science And Religion, Basic Books, ISBN 978-0465075102 online edition
• Lienesch Michael. In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 350pp

• Linder, Douglas (2002), The Scopes Trial: An Introduction, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
• Moran, Jeffrey P. The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002. 240pp
• Moran, Jeffrey P. "The Scopes Trial and Southern Fundamentalism in Black and White: Race, Region, and Religion." Journal of Southern History. Volume: 70. Issue: 1. 2004. pp 95+. online edition
• Smout, Kary Doyle. The Creation/Evolution Controversy: A Battle for Cultural Power. (1998). 210 pp.