The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 was the Tennessee prosecution of high school teacher John Thomas Scopes for violating a state law that banned teaching human evolution in public schools. It was deliberately manufactured as a test case by Dayton boosters, drew Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan to opposite sides of a small-town courtroom, became the first American trial broadcast live on national radio, and ended in a conviction that was later reversed on a technicality. The constitutional question it raised was not settled until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a nearly identical Arkansas law in 1968.
How the Case Was Manufactured
The trial started with a newspaper ad. In the spring of 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union offered to defend any Tennessee teacher prosecuted under the state’s new anti-evolution statute. George Rappleyea, a mining engineer in Dayton, saw the notice and pitched an idea to local businessmen at Robinson’s Drug Store: stage a test case in Rhea County and use the publicity to revive the town’s shrinking economy.
They needed a defendant. They called in John Thomas Scopes, a 24-year-old science teacher and part-time football coach who had once substituted for the regular biology instructor. Scopes agreed, though he later said he was not certain he had actually taught evolution during his brief stint covering the class. The point was less legal precision than filling Dayton’s hotels.
What the Butler Act Actually Prohibited
Scopes was charged under Chapter 27 of Tennessee’s 1925 Public Acts, known as the Butler Act. The statute made it illegal for any teacher at a public school, university, or normal school funded even partly by state money to teach that humans descended from a lower order of animals or to teach any theory denying the biblical account of human creation.1UMKC School of Law. Tennessee Code – Tennessee Anti-evolution Statute
A violation was a misdemeanor carrying a fine of $100 to $500 per offense.1UMKC School of Law. Tennessee Code – Tennessee Anti-evolution Statute There was no jail time. The law reached only taxpayer-funded classrooms and said nothing about private schools or churches.
Darrow, Bryan, and Why It Became a National Event
A small-town misdemeanor became a national event because of the lawyers. The defense recruited Clarence Darrow, the country’s most famous trial lawyer, an outspoken agnostic known for labor cases and death-penalty defenses. Arthur Garfield Hays, a civil liberties attorney, joined him and handled much of the strategy.
The prosecution brought in William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State, who volunteered as a special prosecutor on behalf of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. He was 65, past his political prime, but still enormously popular in rural America. His name alone guaranteed the trial would draw a national audience. Judge John T. Raulston, a local jurist with no experience handling anything at this scale, presided.
Inside the Courtroom
The trial ran from July 10 to July 21, 1925. Dayton filled with journalists, vendors, and spectators. WGN radio in Chicago spent roughly a thousand dollars a day to carry the proceedings live over leased AT&T telephone cables, the first time in American history a trial was broadcast to a national audience in real time. When the courthouse could no longer safely hold the crowd in the Tennessee heat, Judge Raulston moved the proceedings outdoors to a temporary platform, and thousands watched from under the trees.2Smithsonian Institution Archives. Tennessee vs. John Scopes Monkey Trial: Outdoor Trial Showing William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, Dayton, Tennessee
The Expert Witnesses Who Never Testified
Darrow’s core strategy was to put evolution itself on trial. The defense had lined up scientists and theologians ready to testify that evolutionary theory was well-supported and not necessarily incompatible with religious belief. Judge Raulston blocked nearly all of it. He ruled the testimony irrelevant to the only question before the jury: whether Scopes had taught human descent from a lower order of animals in a publicly funded classroom. If he had, he was guilty. Whether evolution was scientifically valid did not matter under the statute.
Raulston allowed the defense to read expert statements into the record for a possible appeal, but the jury never heard them. Darrow needed a different way to make his argument.
Darrow Puts Bryan on the Stand
With his scientific witnesses excluded, Darrow called Bryan himself to testify as an expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed, against the advice of his own legal team. The examination took place outdoors on the afternoon of July 20, carried live to the national radio audience.
Darrow’s questions were designed to force Bryan to defend a strictly literal reading of scripture against basic scientific and historical knowledge. He asked whether Bryan believed Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale, whether Joshua actually made the sun stand still, and what would have happened to the earth if it stopped rotating. He pressed Bryan on the age of the earth, the date of the biblical flood, and whether Chinese and Egyptian civilizations predated a literal reading of Genesis. Bryan grew visibly frustrated and accused Darrow of trying to “slur the Bible” and “cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible.”
The exchange did not change the legal outcome. Judge Raulston struck Bryan’s testimony from the record the following day. For the listening public, though, Darrow had gotten the country’s most prominent defender of biblical literalism to concede under oath that some passages might not be meant literally and that he did not know the answers to basic questions about the age of the earth. That moment defined the trial in public memory.
The Verdict and the Appeal
The jury took nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. The defense had essentially conceded that he taught from a textbook covering evolution. Judge Raulston imposed the minimum fine of $100. Five days after the trial ended, Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton, drained by diabetes and the courtroom heat.
The defense appealed, hoping the Tennessee Supreme Court would strike down the Butler Act as unconstitutional. The court refused. In its 1927 opinion, the justices upheld the law, holding that the state’s authority to prescribe what could be taught in its schools extended to prohibiting evolutionary instruction and that the act violated neither the state nor federal constitutions.3UMKC School of Law. Scopes v. State (Tennessee Supreme Court)
The court did, however, reverse Scopes’s conviction on a procedural technicality. The Tennessee Constitution requires that any fine over $50 be assessed by a jury, not a judge.4Justia. Tennessee Constitution Article VI Section 14 – No Fine Shall Be Laid on Any Citizen Because Raulston had imposed the $100 fine himself, the conviction could not stand. The court then recommended that the state drop the case rather than retry it, writing that “the peace and dignity of the State…will be better conserved by the entry of a nolle prosequi.” The attorney general agreed, and the prosecution ended.
What Happened to the Law
The Butler Act stayed on Tennessee’s books for another four decades. The state legislature repealed it on May 18, 1967. By then, similar anti-evolution statutes existed in several other states, and the constitutional question the Scopes defense had wanted answered in 1925 was still open: could a state ban the teaching of evolution?
The U.S. Supreme Court answered the following year. In Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the Court struck down an Arkansas anti-evolution law nearly identical to the Butler Act, holding that a state’s authority over its public school curriculum “does not carry with it the right to prohibit, on pain of criminal penalty, the teaching of a scientific theory or doctrine where that prohibition is based upon reasons that violate the First Amendment.” The Court found the Arkansas law existed to suppress a scientific theory because it conflicted with a particular interpretation of Genesis, making it an unconstitutional establishment of religion.5Justia. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)
Opponents of evolution adapted. Louisiana passed a “balanced treatment” law in the 1980s requiring creationism to be taught alongside evolution. The Supreme Court struck that down in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), finding that the law’s purpose was to advance a particular religious belief and violated the Establishment Clause.6Justia. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987)
Together, Epperson and Edwards settled what Scopes never did. States cannot use criminal law to suppress scientific instruction because it conflicts with religious doctrine, and they cannot require religious alternatives to be taught as science.
Why Most People Remember It Wrong
The trial might have faded into legal footnotes if not for Inherit the Wind, a 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that dramatized the case with thinly fictionalized characters. The play ran for over 800 performances on Broadway, and a 1960 film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy earned four Academy Award nominations. For most Americans, that dramatization became the primary lens through which they understood the case. The play is still regularly performed and assigned in schools, which means public memory of Scopes owes more to the stage version than to the trial record. The real events were messier, funnier, and more calculated than any script could capture.