The Scopes Trial
Note: I wrote this paper for my 11th grade U.S. History class. The citations are in MLA style. It's here for reading only; please do NOT quote me, cite me, plagiarize me or do anything stupid like that.
After World War I, America underwent drastic cultural changes. The Roaring Twenties fostered the rise of a new morality, and people began to think independently. The modern, rebellious nature of 1920s culture worried many Christians, who saw their traditional beliefs being demeaned by new scientific ideas and negligent attitudes. Christians, especially fundamentalists, began to fight for their faith, which they feared might slip away in the strong current of the cultural shift. Their efforts took the battle up to the level of impacting United States law itself. One of these efforts resulted in the 1925 Scopes Trial, a profound conflict between traditional religious ideas and the modern culture that threatened to marginalize religion.
The roots of the Scopes Trial begin in fundamentalist beliefs. Fundamentalism is the belief in Biblical, Protestant traditions, emphasizing the doctrine that God is involved with humanity and that the Bible and its story of God’s creation of the world should be interpreted literally (Brinkley 270). This philosophy emerged in reaction to a decline in traditional Christianity in the late 1800’s, after Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of his theory of evolution in The Origin of Species (268). Society was persuaded by the scientific evidence, and the Christian sect also drifted towards these secular ideas (Blake 16-17). Many Christians started to believe that Darwinian evolution was compatible with the Biblical creation story, dismissing the teaching in Genesis that God created the world in six days (17). Another contributing factor to this “liberal Protestantism” was the psychology of Sigmund Freud, which “suggested that an individual’s mental health and spiritual well-being depended . . . on the individual’s relationship to this world, not to God” (Brinkley 268). In the midst of this deluge, fundamentalists rose up, standing firm against the modern secularization of Christianity (270). They formed the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1918, which tried to weed out modernist Christians who disagreed with basic Biblical teachings, and to preserve American education from the theory of evolution by banning its teaching (272-73). One of the few successes of their activism was the spark for the Scopes Trial.
The Scopes Trial came about as the result of a clash between a legal statute and a political organization. On March 13, 1925, fundamentalist goals were realized in the passing of the Butler Act (Caudill 4). This enactment made it illegal in the state of Tennessee to teach evolution in public schools (Kraft 25). The Act ruled, “It shall be unlawful . . . to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” (Brinkley 268). However, to many, this law appeared to threaten the First Amendment rights of freedom of religion and free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that stood for constitutional rights, took interest in the Butler Act. They began a search for a Tennessee teacher who was willing to be arrested and tried for teaching evolution. Since the law was disregarded by most, this person was not hard to find. The ACLU asked John Thomas Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, to stand trial in the test case. Scopes agreed, thinking he had nothing to lose except a small fine if he were to be found guilty (Kraft 26).
To understand the events and conflicts of the trial, it is necessary to understand the personalities and beliefs of the people involved in it. John Thomas Scopes was an unmarried man of 25, and fairly new to Dayton, where he coached football and taught math and physics at the high school (Blake 16). He only taught evolution as a substitute for the biology teacher, but he admitted that even by doing that he had gone against the Butler Act (13). He said that biology could not be taught without including Darwinian evolution (11). Scopes was a Christian, but not a fundamentalist; he was an “independent thinker” who valued intellectual freedom (14-16). When he agreed to stand up for his values in court, the ACLU hired one of the best defense lawyers possible (Kraft 26). Clarence Darrow, 68, was famous as a trial lawyer with a strong legal mind (Blake 22). He exulted in defying tradition by applying psychology in his trials. As an agnostic, he thought Christianity was “silly,” and he jumped at the opportunity to further attack the Bible by shoving science into the fundamentalists’ faces (Caudill 8). On the opposing side, the prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, was a distinguished orator praised for his eloquent speaking (Kraft 27). Called “The Great Commoner,” he was famous for unsuccessfully running for president three times on the platform of defending farmers, workers, and women’s rights. His beliefs were the stark opposite of Darrow’s: his fundamentalist views of the Bible caused him to reject evolution. “It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of rocks,” he said, showing an almost flippant disregard for science in general (Blake 25). The convergence of these two famous lawyers to hash out this widely popular controversy created the perfect opportunity for news and radio reporters. One of the most famous was H. L. Mencken, a well-known journalist, a man disdainful of the rustic, rural traditions of the South, who nicknamed the upcoming trial “The Great Monkey Trial.” Tourists, attracted by the intriguing debate, crowded the small town of Dayton during the hot days of summer, buying up monkey dolls as souvenirs (Kraft 29).
The Scopes Trial ended up being about much more than just a broken law. It began on July 10, 1925, with the selection of the jury (Caudill 14). The judge, John T. Raulston, started the court proceedings with a prayer, despite Darrow’s objections (Kraft 33). Although the purpose of the trial was simply to discern whether Scopes had violated the Butler Act, the opposing sides skewed the issue in different ways. Those defending Scopes pointed out that the law only prohibited the teaching of theories which contradicted the Biblical creation story, and they aimed to show that the theory of evolution did not contradict the Bible. However, the prosecution said that a clear-cut answer to the issue could be reached by simply proving that Scopes had taught evolution (Caudill 15). After cross-examining witnesses who confirmed that he had indeed done this, Darrow and Bryan argued over whether it was relevant to question expert scientists. Darrow wanted to query scientists about evolution, but Bryan said that it would be insignificant. Judge Raulston ruled in Bryan’s favor by not allowing Darrow to call scientists to the stand (15-16). So Darrow, in need of a way to revive his foundering case, decided to question Bryan as a witness; instead of an expert scientist, he would question an expert on the Bible (16). Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan, which took place outside of the Dayton courthouse because of the boiling heat inside, was scathing, relentless, and revealing to the attentive crowd and all of the Americans who listened on their radios (Brinkley 266). Darrow concentrated on literal interpretation of the Bible and on Bryan’s ignorance of science and other religions (Caudill 16). Bryan was not a “Biblical literalist,” and he let down the fundamentalist cause by agreeing that the Biblical six days of creation were probably longer than just 24-hour periods (17). After this intense dialogue between the two famous lawyers, the verdict was quite anticlimactic. Scopes was guilty of violating the Butler Act, the jury pronounced on July 21, and he was required to pay a $100 fine. “I will continue,” Scopes remarked, “to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideals of academic freedom . . . of personal and religious freedom” (Blake 50). Within a few days the bustle of observers and reporters had cleared out of the town of Dayton (51). On July 26, the last significant bit of news about the trial came to light: Bryan died in his sleep. Some reporters blamed Darrow’s cross-examination for causing him “to die of a broken heart” (Kraft 46).
In retrospect, the aftermath of the Scopes Trial had profound implications for America and its culture. The fundamentalists’ efforts were widely scattered. The trial, especially the lack of intellectualism demonstrated by Bryan, made their beliefs seem ignorant and old-fashioned, and Christian modernists and agnostics alike continued to ridicule fundamentalism (Brinkley 274). In 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote a play about the Scopes Trial entitled Inherit the Wind, which became a movie in 1960. This dramatization made fundamentalism look like “a threat to intellectual freedom from backward, bigoted, uneducated people” (275). However, the fundamentalists continued to influence American legislation, as evidenced by three more state anti-evolution statutes that were passed after the trial (Blake 52). In 1965, 40 years after the trial, John Thomas Scopes reflected on its impact, saying, “The trial marked a beginning of the development of a national consciousness of the roles played by religion, science, and education. . . . I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past” (Linder). His speculation was correct. In 1967, three years before Scopes’s death, the Butler Act was repealed, soon followed by the other three state laws. This was because in the 1960’s, America felt a need to surpass the Soviet Union in science and education, so the teaching of evolution became accepted again (Blake 52). Even after evolution in public schools grew to be widely tolerated, the fundamentalists still did not give up. In the last decades of the 20th century and even more recently, fundamentalist groups were revived, opposing modernism and “secular humanism.” Some even pushed for another ban on the teaching of evolution (Brinkley 276). All this goes to show that the debate between fundamentalism and modernism will take more than a legal ruling to put to rest.
The Scopes Trial was a conflict of the ideas of science versus faith, and this polarization of beliefs in America still remains today. Although the current trend among public educators is to diminish the creationist voice in the teaching of science, the fact that the controversy continues is an indirect testimony that the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and religion are still functioning properly. Americans have the right to an independent frame of mind, with the freedom to choose their own beliefs from the realms of religion and science.
Works Cited
Blake, Arthur. The Scopes Trial: Defending the Right to Teach. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1994.
Brinkley, Alan. “The Scopes Trial: Darrow v. Bryan.” Days of Destiny: Crossroads in American History. Ed. James M. McPherson and Alan Brinkley. New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2001. 265-276.
Caudill, Edward, Edward Larson, and Jesse Fox Mayshark. The Scopes Trial: A Photographic History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000.
Kraft, Betsy Harvey. “‘Your Old Man’s a Monkey’: The Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.” Sensational Trials of the 20th Century. New York: Scholastic, 1998. 24-47.
Linder, Douglas. “Reflections—Forty Years After.” Famous Trials in American History: Tennessee vs. John Scopes. 2002. University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.
16 Apr. 2008 <http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/
scopesreflections.html>.
