Scientist of the Day - The Scopes Trial
The jury for the Scopes trial being sworn in, July 10, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee (famous-trials.com)
The Scopes trial began exactly a century ago, on this day, July 10, 1925, in a county courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. The Scopes trial is one of the two best-known judicial proceedings in the history of science, the other being the trial of Galileo in 1633. We have told parts of the story of the Scopes trial in previous posts, one on John Scopes himself; one on H. L. Mencken, the reporter who covered the 11-day trial for the Baltimore Sun, and one on a day in the life of William Jennings Bryan, July 20, 1925, when Bryan volunteered to be cross-examined by Clarence Darrow as an expert witness on creationism. We are going to devote three of the next 11 days to other aspects of the trial: the fifth day, July 16, when Bryan dramatically attacked the textbook used by Scopes; and the last day, July 21, when we will look at the verdict and its aftermath. But today, we are going to discuss the formative period, 1910-1925, so we can understand why the Scopes trial occurred at all, 86 years after Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species.
John Scopes, photograph, 1925, Library of Congress (loc.gov)
Surprisingly, there was little controversy about teaching evolution in American public schools in, say, 1910. Nearly all scientists had accepted some form of evolution by the turn of the century, so one would expect it to make its way into textbooks in botany, zoology, geology, and, after 1910, biology. There was little mention in such texts of creationism as an alternative. This would be the case with George Hunter's A Civic Biology (1914), the textbook later used by Scopes in Dayton in 1925.
Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan, photograph taken just before or during the Scopes trial, July 1925 (Wikimedia commons)
But a lot would change after Hunter's textbook appeared. For one thing, public education grew explosively in the 1910s. Something like 1.5% of eligible adolescents attended public high schools in 1900; 20 years later, the number of students reading textbooks had multiplied by a factor of 20 or 30, so there were many more students shocking their parents with “what we learned in school today.” And there were other significant social changes, many of them spearheaded by one man, William Jennings Bryan, the populist progressive reformer and three-time Presidential candidate. Bryan campaigned for women's right to vote, for a respectable minimum wage, for increased public education, and for prohibition. But he was also an evangelical fundamentalist Christian and firmly opposed to any evolutionary account of human origins. In 1918, Bryan was instrumental in helping William Bell Riley found the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA), with a primary goal of getting evolution out of public schools, and creationism in. It was in partial response to the formation of the WCFA that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was organized in 1920.
Judge John T. Raulston (right) with William Jennings Bryan, at the Scopes trial, July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee (rheacountyheritage.com)
One of the goals of the WCFA was to lobby state legislatures throughout the South to enact laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Their efforts finally bore fruit in 1925, when several states enacted such laws, including Tennessee. The Tennessee statute was called the Butler Act, and it was signed into law in April of 1925. Immediately, the ACLU placed notices in local Tennessee newspapers, letting it be known that if anyone wanted to test the law by violating the statute, the ACLU would provide legal counsel and pay all expenses for a trial.
Some of the town fathers in Dayton, the county seat of Rhea County, realized that a trial in the local county courthouse would probably bring onlookers, reporters, and money into the town, and went looking for a volunteer. They found one in John Scopes, who was a coach at the county high school and taught biology on the side, using Hunter's A Civic Biology as a text (as mandated, ironically, by the state Board of Education). The authorities were notified as to Scope's now illegal activities in the classroom, he was arrested, and a trial date was set. There was a local prosecutor, but the WCFA sent in Bryan as a special prosecutor, while the ACLU brought in Dudley Field Malone and Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney, as additional counsel for the defendant. The presiding judge was John T. Raulston, a conservative fundamentalist who would prove himself decidedly partial to the prosecution during the course of the trial (fourth image).
Clarence Darrow addressing the jurors, Scopes trial, July 1924, Dayton, Tennessee (famous-trials.com)
Nothing much happened that first day, except that a jury was chosen and sworn in (first image). That was a Friday, so the thousands of spectators who had come to town for the "Monkey trial" (so dubbed by H.L. Mencken) had to spend the weekend listening to evangelicals on street corners or watching performing simians brought to town for the purpose, until the trial began in earnest on Monday, July 13.
Historic marker, The Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee , recent photograph (Wikimedia commons)
Our next stop? Thursday, July 16, 1925, when Bryan had a field day fulminating against Hunter's manual for infidels, A Civic Biology. Meanwhile, if you want to get a head start, I highly recommend a book that I used as a text when my classes discussed the subject: The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, by Jeffrey P. Moran (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), which provides summaries and extracts of each day of the trial. I hope it is still in print.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
