Scopes trial

In July 1925 a young science teacher named John T. Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for breaking a new state law against teaching human evolution in public schools. The case was arranged on purpose as a test of the law and as a publicity stunt for the town, but it turned into a national spectacle, pitting the politician William Jennings Bryan against the defence lawyer Clarence Darrow. It became a lasting symbol of the clash between religious fundamentalism and modern science in the United States.

The theory of evolution by natural selection, set out by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, had been accepted by many churches, but American Protestantism in the early twentieth century was split between modernists, who sought to reconcile faith with science, and fundamentalists, who insisted on a literal reading of the Bible. In Tennessee, the legislator John Washington Butler introduced a bill banning the teaching of human evolution in state schools, and Governor Austin Peay signed it on 21 March 1925. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) then offered to defend any teacher charged under the new law.

On 5 April 1925 George Rappleyea, a local mining company manager, met town figures in a Dayton drugstore and persuaded them that a trial would bring the town attention. They called in Scopes, then 24, who had stood in for the regular biology teacher. The prescribed state textbook, George William Hunter's Civic Biology, itself presented evolution. Scopes had no clear memory of ever teaching the subject, but agreed to be the defendant. He was indicted on 25 May after three students testified before a grand jury.

Bryan, three times the Democratic presidential candidate and a former Secretary of State, joined the prosecution. Darrow, a famous criminal lawyer and an agnostic, volunteered for the defence alongside Arthur Garfield Hays of the ACLU and the lawyer Dudley Field Malone.

Proceedings ran from 10 to 21 July 1925 before Judge John T. Raulston. The defence argued that evolution and the Bible need not conflict and brought scientific experts, but the judge refused to let most of them testify in person, allowing only written statements for use on appeal. On the seventh day, with the court moved outdoors, probably because of the heat, Darrow called Bryan himself as a witness on the Bible and questioned him for around two hours about Genesis and other stories. The judge then struck the exchange from the record.

Darrow asked the jury to return a guilty verdict so that the case could go to a higher court. After about nine minutes of deliberation the jury convicted Scopes, and the judge fined him $100. Bryan died five days after the trial ended.

More than 200 reporters came to Dayton, and Chicago's WGN radio made it the first American trial broadcast nationally. The journalist H. L. Mencken, whose newspaper helped pay the defence costs, mocked the town and Bryan and popularised the name "Monkey Trial".

The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional but overturned the conviction because the jury, not the judge, should have set a fine above $50, and it recommended that the case be dropped. The Butler Act stayed in force until its repeal in 1967, and Mississippi and Arkansas passed similar laws. In 1968 the US Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that such bans breached the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The 1955 play Inherit the Wind and its 1960 film fictionalised the trial for later generations.

The trial took place within the United States shown on our 1920 and 1930 maps.