John Washington Butler was a
farmer from Tennessee, who was also a State Representative and head of the
World's Christian Fundamentals Association. Alarmed by newspaper reports that
children were denying the literal truth of the Bible after being taught evolutionary
theory in science lessons, he introduced legislation that forbade teaching
“… any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
The Butler Act became effective in the state of Tennessee from
March 21st 1925, and quickly came to the attention of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which offered to support anyone prosecuted under
the Act. George Rappelyea, a mining engineer from Dayton, Tennessee, together
with Walter White, county superintendent of schools, and Sue K Hicks, a local
attorney (and, incidentally, a man – his name may have inspired the song ‘A
Boy Named Sue’), hatched a plot to bring a test case to court, hoping the
resultant publicity would bring much-needed revenue to the town of Dayton.
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| John Thomas Scopes |
They
persuaded a local supply teacher, John Thomas Scopes, who was a sports coach
and sometimes covered maths and science classes, to plead guilty to teaching
evolution in a high school class, not least because the required text-book in
Tennessee classrooms, Civic Biology by G W Hunter, included a chapter on
evolution, thereby necessitating teachers to break the law. Scopes, although
initially reticent, soon became an enthusiastic participant in the case and
incriminated himself, being arrested (but never detained) and charged for
teaching evolution, in violation of The Butler Act, to a high school class on
April 24th 1925.
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| William Jennings Bryan |
Both prosecution and defence teams set about
recruiting members – the prosecution included the brothers (and friends of
Scopes) Herbert and Sue Hicks, Tom Stewart (later a US Senator) and William
Jennings Bryan (known as The Great Commoner, he was a three-times Democratic
presidential nominee, former Secretary of State and fervent Presbyterian).
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| Clarence Darrow |
For
the defence were Clarence Darrow, Arthur Hays and Dudley Malone. The trial, in
the court of Judge John T Raulston, began on July 10th 1925, and
became famous across the world as reporters descended on Dayton to cover the
case, which became popularly known as ‘The Scopes Monkey Trial’ (so
named by H L Mencken). Dayton attracted preachers, lawyers, students,
politicians and academics and its streets began to resemble a media circus,
with food stalls, souvenir salesmen and sideshows, by far exceeding the
expectations of Rappelyea and his associates. A banner, hanging on the side of
the courthouse read ‘Read Your Bible Daily.’
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| Bethlehem Globe July 10th 1925 |
As the first session began,
Judge Raulston quoted from The Butler Act and the book of Genesis, and warned
the jury that they were trying Scopes for violating the Act, and not the merits
of the Act itself. Darrow’s intention was for Scopes to be found guilty, so
that he could appeal the decision to a higher court, and throughout the trial
he clashed with Judge Raulston, whom he considered to be biased against his
client. Such was the crush in the courtroom that Raulston, fearing for the
safety of the floor, and with the temperature reaching in excess of one hundred
degrees, he moved the proceedings outside.
Bryan called four witnesses on the
first two days, students who confirmed that Scopes had taught evolution on the
day in question (although it seems that Scopes was not in the school on that
day…) and the prosecution rested its case. Darrow tried to have the case
quashed on the grounds that the Butler Act was unconstitutional, but Raulston
ruled that this argument was inadmissible, so Darrow changed tack. He tried to
have twelve expert witnesses – academics and theologians – called but again
Raulston blocked him, although he allowed their written testimonies to be
admitted, largely in anticipation of future appeals.
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| Darrow (left) and Bryan |
In another twist, Darrow
called Bryan to the stand – the two had once been friends but over time a deep
antagonism had developed between them – and Darrow said he only took the case
because “…for years, I've wanted to put Bryan in his place as a bigot.”
Darrow spent two hours cross-examining Bryan, probing at his knowledge of, and
belief in, the Bible – were Adam and Eve the first humans, where did Cain’s
wife come from, did all languages stem from the Tower of Babel, was Jonah
really swallowed by a whale, was the world created in six days? Bryan began by
stating his unswerving belief in the literal truth of the Bible, but as the
questioning continued he began to admit that some things were not to be taken
literally – ‘Ye are the Salt of the Earth’ didn’t really mean that
people were actually made out of salt, and the six days of creation were not
actually six lots of twenty-four hours but “My impression is they were
periods [that] might have continued for millions of years.” Darrow’s
trap was sprung and Bryan had walked right in; his unswerving belief was not
quite as literal as he had claimed.
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| Dayton 1925 |
Then, in a master move, Darrow demanded an
immediate verdict, without offering a closing statement for the defence. Under
Tennessee state law, this prevented Bryan from making a corresponding statement
for the prosecution – something that Bryan had intended to use to deliver his
grandiloquent summing up, which he had spent the previous seven weeks writing
and practicing, an hour-and-a-half-long closing argument that he hoped would be
“… the mountain peak of my life's effort.”
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| Judge Raulston and family - (not related to monkeys, allegedly). |
On July 25th 1925, the jury took nine minutes to find
Scopes guilty, and Judge Raulston imposed a fine of $100. An appeal was
launched, which overturned the original verdict on a technicality – for fines
in excess of $50, the jury and not the judge should have decided on the amount
– but Darrow’s hopes of taking the case further were crushed when the Chief
Justice of Tennessee nullified Scopes’s indictment and threw the case (which he
called ‘bizarre’) out of court.
In April 1967, Tennessee repealed the
Butler Act, over forty years after the Scopes trial.
Five days after the end of
the trial, William Jennings Bryan took a post-prandial Sunday afternoon nap
from which he didn’t wake up, succumbing to the diabetes that had troubled him
for years, which created a leadership vacuum in the fundamentalist camp that
remained largely unfilled.
Scopes was offered a further contract at Dayton High
School, on condition that he did not teach evolution again, but he declined and
took up a graduate scholarship at the University of Chicago, where he qualified
as geologist, going on to work for the United Gas Company. He died in 1970,
aged 70.
Darrow, who had already announced his intention to retire before he
took the Scopes case, withdrew from legal practice (apart from the Massie trial
in 1931), and died in 1938 from pulmonary heart disease. He is regarded as one
of the greatest American civil libertarians.
The debate about evolution
continues in America, and from time to time threatens to break out here in
Britain. Suffice it to say that Charles Darwin appears on our money, in
recognition of his remarkable contribution to mankind.
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| Two Pound coin |
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| Ten Pound note |
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