A century later, impacts of the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ still echo

One hundred years ago, a small town in eastern Tennessee captured the attention of the entire country.

A biology teacher in Dayton was accused of teaching human evolution to his students. At the time, that was illegal in Tennessee. This teacher was put on trial for his crime — an event that quickly became 1925’s biggest media event. In fact, it proved one of the most dramatic trials in U.S. history.

Science News reporter Watson Davis took this photo of John Scopes a month before the substitute biology teacher went on trial. Scopes was charged with breaking the Butler Act. This law banned the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee schools.Watson Davis/Smithsonian Institution

From July 10 to July 21, two nationally known, powerhouse lawyers — prosecutor William Jennings Bryan and defense attorney Clarence Darrow — traded sharp verbal barbs in court. What developed turned into far more than a debate over whether one small-town teacher had violated state law. The trial became about religion versus science and old versus new. It also highlighted a personal beef between Bryan and Darrow.

The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes is better remembered today as the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” It ended with Scopes being found guilty and fined $100.

The jury’s verdict would later be overturned on a technicality. But the trial’s impact did not end here. Its echoes would be felt in science education for decades. It also would lead the way to future court battles — ones that far exceeded the Scopes trial in legal importance (though never in spectacle).

Today, the majority of Americans accept the theory of evolution as valid. Indeed, it has become increasingly essential to understanding the natural world and human origins.

Evolution, generally, also helps explain the rise of new pathogens, such as the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of pesticide and antibiotic resistance. These processes of adaptation also make clear how plants and animals accommodate to their ever-changing environments.

To commemorate the centennial of the Scopes trial and its legacy, Science News (our sister publication) asked freelance journalist Darren Incorvaia to speak with Randy Moore. This biologist at the University of Minnesota not only is an expert on the trial, but also authored the 2023 book John Thomas Scopes: A Biography.

Their conversation, below, has been edited (with Moore’s permission) for length and clarity.

Celebrity lawyers William Jennings Bryan (seated, left) and Clarence Darrow (standing, right) debated here, in 1925, about whether Tennessee should be allowed to ban the teaching of human evolution.Watson Davis/Smithsonian Institution

SN: The United States was very different 100 years ago. What was life like back then and how did it set the stage for the Scopes trial?

Moore: The first cars were coming off assembly lines. Women claimed the right to vote in 1920. There was new music — jazz — called the devil’s music. People were leaving rural areas and moving to cities.

This great war — World War I — had recently ended, too, shattering many people’s views of all this societal progress. Many people became afraid of change, with a desire to return to the good old days.

Against this backdrop, a movement was emerging that would be known as modernism. It harmonized with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Reason and logic became the source of truth, not literal readings of scripture. Many people abandoned the old ways for this modernism because they felt the old ways were narrow-minded, ill-suited for this new life.

The modernists viewed traditional religion as a reversion to ignorance. But traditionalists countered them, saying “this is how you destroy a country.”

Here’s some original footage from 1925’s so-called Scopes “Monkey Trial.” It pitted fundamentalist Tennesseans against a young teacher who — contrary to law — taught the theory of human evolution. Two of the era’s great courtroom orators, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, debated science, religion and Constitutional rights.

SN: So there was a big reaction against this social change going on.

Moore: There was a rise and popularity of religious celebrities, preachers who tapped into this discontent. Some made opposing evolution their cause. Dwight Moody sort of started it in the 1800s in Chicago. Later, there was Billy Sunday. He would go into towns and attract 5,000 or 10,000 people per service.

Here in Minneapolis, about a mile from my office, was the guy who started to change everything. He was a preacher here at First Baptist Church named William Bell Riley. He realized that to change society, he had to get laws passed.

So he organized the World Christian Fundamentals Association in the late 1910s. And it caught on immediately. Riley was a Baptist, but the group was not restricted to Baptists. It had up to 6 million members at its height.

Then, in 1925, Tennessee state representative John Butler introduced a law banning the teaching of human evolution. And it passed.

SN: It didn’t ban all evolution, just human evolution?

Moore: Human evolution. That was the sacred cow. It’s fine for skunks to evolve.

Billy Sunday had just been in Memphis. He had preached to almost 10 percent of Tennessee’s population. Politicians who wanted to be re-elected figured they couldn’t oppose the new law.

SN: So fundamentalists opposed human evolution because the idea that we share a common ancestor with other apes and evolved from earlier forms contradicts the Bible’s story of creation? It’s a concern that anti-evolution groups still hold. But that wasn’t the only thing that led to the trial. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wanted to challenge the law. And locals hoped a court challenge would bring publicity to Dayton. How did those forces combine?

Moore: Someone at the ACLU saw a little news clipping about Tennessee criminalizing the teaching of human evolution and showed it to the group’s executive director. The ACLU then placed an advertisement in some Tennessee papers seeking someone to challenge the Butler Act.

They got one response. An engineer named George Rappleyea was in Dayton to close a big coal plant. The coal industry had collapsed several years earlier. The city’s population had plummeted. The town was getting poorer. People there needed something to revive the economy.

Rappleyea showed the ad to a group of local businessmen and said, “Why don’t we have a test case here?”

They weren’t activists who care all that much about evolution, specifically. But they realized, look at all this publicity. We can make some money. This could revive Dayton.

SN: How did they find their defendant?

Moore: They approached the high school’s full-time biology teacher, William Ferguson, who was also the school principal. And they asked him: “Would you consent to be arrested?” He said no.

Then they came across John Scopes. He’d been the substitute teacher in Ferguson’s biology class for two weeks in April of 1925. A first-year teacher and a football coach, he immediately agreed to take part.

The trial could not have happened without his consent.

SN: How did the arrest of a small-town teacher charged with a misdemeanor evolve into a national media circus?

Moore: The next big step involved William Bell Riley. He was the guy in Minneapolis who organized the religious fundamentalists in opposition to evolution. Riley heard about this and said: “This is where we take our stand. Who can we get to represent us? William Jennings Bryan.”

Bryan was a national figure. He had run for president three times as the Democratic nominee. [He’d also been a former U.S. congressman from Nebraska and U.S. Secretary of State.] He had been condemning evolution. He said, “Yes, I will help prosecute John Scopes.” His joining on behalf of Tennessee was a big deal.

Then the biggest publicity event occurred. Arguably the most famous criminal-defense attorney in the country’s history — Clarence Darrow — volunteered to defend Scopes.

Darrow had campaigned for Bryan [in his presidential races]. But Darrow hated that Bryan had turned to religious fundamentalism. He especially hated his opposition to evolution. Darrow was an agnostic [meaning he wasn’t sure he believed in a god]. So he wanted to expose Bryan’s religious fundamentalism.

Once Darrow entered the contest, people immediately forgot about John Scopes. He was almost irrelevant in his own trial.

It became a showdown. Christianity versus atheism. The old versus the new. Bryan versus Darrow.

One day, they started the afternoon proceedings before Scopes even got to the courthouse. It was as if it wasn’t about Scopes.

SN: What was this showdown like? How did the day-to-day of the trial go?

Moore: The prosecution claimed that only John Scopes was on trial. Did he teach human evolution? That’s the only issue. And according to his own students, he did. Two of them got up and testified.

Meanwhile, the defense argued John Scopes is not on trial: The law is. This is about Scopes’ rights.

Darrow brought in experts to testify about the validity of evolution, that evolution was a well-accepted idea. The state’s lawyers objected. And on the second Friday of the trial, the 17th, the judge announced that expert testimony would be excluded. In the end, most science experts never testified.

Seven scientists who agreed to testify on behalf of John Scopes pose for this picture. In the end, the trial judge would rule that the jury would not be allowed to consider the experts’ testimony. Watson Davis/Smithsonian Institution

SN: What was the media coverage like? Was it as big as those businessmen hoped?

Moore: More than 100 reporters came to Dayton. Anything about the Scopes trial would sell papers. Like what Scopes wore. (He was popular with the ladies.) He was also described as a great football coach.

He was a media darling. Reporters could not care less about evolution. They wanted the name-calling. And there was a lot of that. Reporters said, “My editor can’t get enough.”

The biggest event of the trial happened when the judge ruled that the scientific testimony was irrelevant. The weather had gotten so hot that the proceedings moved outside to this platform. A crowd of several thousand people outside the Rhea County Courthouse now watched the trial.

The Scopes trial was widely attended. On some days as many as 1,000 people (including reporters) packed the “court” (on some days, as here, held outdoors).Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The defense asked, “You would not let us put on experts about science; can we put on an expert about the Bible?” The judge said yes.

And then, in a spectacular move, Darrow called William Jennings Bryan as a witness. Bryan knew he couldn’t refuse.

Darrow grilled him with questions about literal interpretations of the Bible. Was Jonah really swallowed by a big fish? Did the sun stand still? How old is the Earth?

Bryan defended himself relatively well. But the press portrayed him as the loser. Science News-Letter, the precursor of Science News, reported on “Bryan’s pitiful exhibition of ignorance.”

SN: That was a savvy move from Darrow. So in the eyes of the media, Darrow won the showdown with Bryan, even though Scopes lost the trial. What happened after the verdict?

Moore: One of the biggest impacts of the trial was that the word — literally the word, evolution — disappeared from biology textbooks. Pictures of Charles Darwin were gone. It was a horrible loss for teaching evolution. This unifying idea in all of biology was not mentioned.

And religious fundamentalism didn’t go away. It got stronger.

SN: Because Scopes’ conviction was overturned, the defense couldn’t appeal the case, right?

Moore: The ACLU looked for another defendant and couldn’t find one. And so the Butler Act stayed on the books for 40-something years. Until the late 1960s.

Two other states had passed similar laws, Arkansas and Mississippi. A teacher challenged Arkansas’ law, and her case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled unanimously that banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools is unconstitutional [because it violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech].

SN: That case was Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968.

Moore: The plaintiff, Susan Epperson, was a new biology teacher in Little Rock. She felt she was in an impossible position. If I teach legitimate biology, she worried, I’m knowingly breaking the law. If I follow the law, I’m doing a disservice to my students.

She was asked if she would test the anti-evolution law. After getting the enthusiastic support of her husband, she took on the case. And won.

See Susan Epperson describe how she got recruited to challenge a state law that banned the teaching of evolution in Arkansas’ public schools. In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that this law — and others like it — were unconstitutional and could no longer be enforced in the United States.

SN: But people don’t remember that trial, which was a big win for science and evolution.

Moore: One reason: There weren’t witnesses. There also wasn’t an explosive Bryan-versus-Darrow confrontation. And the lawyers stuck with the facts.

You’re right; it was a dramatically important case for science education. It gave teachers the freedom to teach truth, to teach well-accepted ideas in public schools. Hard to top that one.

Susan Epperson finished what John Scopes started.

SN: Today, anti-science attitudes can be found all across society, including in the federal government. What’s the legacy of the Scopes trial? And how did it help get us to our current moment?

Moore: The Scopes trial is looked at as damaging the whole notion of expertise. The judge wouldn’t allow the scientific experts to testify. And we see that now, with experts being shut down.

Everybody has their own microphone now. Anyone can claim to be an expert. True experts are important, so you need to be skeptical of what you hear and search for real expertise.