By the Way: A century since the Scopes trial

Before O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco led police on a slow-speed chase down a Los Angeles freeway in 1994, leading to his trial the following year, Americans considered the events unfolding in the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, during July 1925 the “trial of the century.” Many of the issues raised in the second-story courtroom of the Rhea County courthouse are still contested a hundred years later.

John Washington Butler, a corn and tobacco farmer, introduced the Butler Act, banning the teaching of evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. Austin Peay, the governor, signed the legislation with the understanding that it would never be enforced.

The American Civil Liberties Union quickly decided to challenge the law and advertised for schoolteachers who might be willing to stand trial. Some local boosters in Dayton, a small town that had fallen on hard times, saw this as an opportunity to bring publicity to Dayton. They summoned a young teacher from the local high school, John Thomas Scopes, to Fred Robinson’s drugstore, plied him with a fountain drink and asked if he would be willing to be charged with violating the Butler Act. He consented.

William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president, agreed to assist the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, perhaps the most famous defense attorney in the country, lead the defense team. By the time the trial opened on July 10, Dayton was awash in visitors, including journalists, partisans on one side or the other and chimpanzees. Banners advocated Bible-reading. Lemonade stands popped up. Nearly a thousand people crowded into the courtroom, and over Darrow’s objections, the Scopes trial opened with prayer.

The trial itself was less about Scopes himself or whether he had in fact taught evolution in violation of the Butler Act. As the proceedings unfolded, the trial became a proxy for larger issues. Bryan posited that “if evolution wins, Christianity goes,” and Darrow countered: “Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.” He added that the prosecution was “opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages.”

Because the judge refused to hear testimony from most of the defense witnesses, the defense called Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed.

Darrow proceeded with a fusillade of village atheist questions about Jonah and the whale, Noah and the great flood, Joshua making the sun stand still and the creation stories in Genesis. Bryan, who had initially insisted that “everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there,” eventually conceded that the six days of Genesis in the first creation account might refer to “periods” rather than 24-hour days.

As everyone expected, the jury found Scopes guilty of violating the Butler Act, and he was fined $100. The consensus for decades, however, is that Bryan and evangelicals lost decisively in the courtroom of public opinion. But is that true?

Although it was never enforced, the Butler Act remained on the books in Tennessee until 1967. Publishers, afraid of a backlash from evangelicals, quietly expunged evolution from their textbooks. Many states continued to prohibit the teaching of evolution in public schools, which led in turn to an alarming decline in science education, a deficit that came finally to public notice when the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957. John F. Kennedy’s aspirations to land a man on the moon jumpstarted science education in the 1960s, which rested in turn on the fundamentals of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

But many evangelicals remained wary. Several organizations emerged in the 1960s and 1970s — the Creation Research Society, Bible Science Association, the Institute for Creation Research, among others — that advocated “creationism” and later, “scientific creationism,” a sometimes comic attempt to clothe biblical literalism with scientific legitimacy. When that failed, they turned to the next “evolutionary” form, something called “intelligent design.”

Even as creationists are even now very likely working on a new evolutionary iteration of creationism, the Religious Right continues the attacks on science and public education that animated the Scopes trial a century ago. Evangelicals have identified public education, one of the cornerstones of democracy, as an enemy and have supported efforts to shut down the Department of Education and use taxpayer funds to provide vouchers for religious schools. The Supreme Court, with scant regard for the First Amendment, is abetting those efforts.

The Scopes trial cast a long shadow over American life. The jury may have taken only nine minutes to determine the fate of John Thomas Scopes, but the issues at stake in Dayton are still contested a century later.

Randall Balmer, a professor at Dartmouth College, is the author of 18 books and presenter of several documentaries, including “In the Beginning: The Creationist Controversy.”