The Scopes Monkey Trial was the July 1925 prosecution of Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes for teaching human evolution in violation of a state law called the Butler Act. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but the case, officially State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, became a national spectacle about whether a state could keep scientific ideas out of public school classrooms to protect religious beliefs. The verdict was later thrown out on a technicality, the law itself stayed on the books for another 42 years, and the constitutional question the trial raised was not answered by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1968.
The Law at the Center of the Case
Tennessee’s Butler Act, enacted as Chapter 27 of the 1925 Public Acts, made it a crime for any teacher at a publicly funded school or university in the state to teach that humans evolved from earlier forms of life, or to teach any theory contradicting the biblical account of human creation. Violation was a misdemeanor carrying a fine of $100 to $500 per offense.1UMKC School of Law. Tennessee Evolution Statutes
Several states considered or passed similar measures in the early 1920s as fundamentalist Protestant movements gained political influence. Tennessee’s law was the first to be tested in court.
How the Trial Was Engineered
The case did not start with a crusading teacher getting caught. It was arranged. In early May 1925, a group of businessmen and civic leaders met at Robinson’s Drug Store in Dayton, Tennessee, to discuss an offer the American Civil Liberties Union had placed in state newspapers: the ACLU would fund the defense of any teacher willing to challenge the Butler Act. George Rappleyea, a local mining engineer, pushed the idea, arguing that a high-profile trial would draw publicity and money to a town that badly needed both.
The group recruited John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old football coach who occasionally substituted in science classes at Rhea County High School. Scopes later acknowledged he was never sure he had actually taught evolution, but he agreed to serve as the defendant because he opposed the law on principle. A grand jury indicted him, and the case was on its way.
Bryan for the Prosecution, Darrow for the Defense
Leading the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, a former Secretary of State, three-time presidential candidate, and one of the most famous orators in the country. Bryan was 65 and joined the case on behalf of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, viewing the trial as a stand against what he saw as the erosion of moral values in public education.
The defense was anchored by Clarence Darrow, widely considered the most skilled trial lawyer in the United States. Darrow was an agnostic and a committed civil libertarian who had built his reputation defending unpopular clients. He volunteered his services without a fee.
Journalist H.L. Mencken, writing sharp and often contemptuous dispatches for the Baltimore Sun, shaped how much of the country understood the proceedings. The nickname “Monkey Trial” stuck largely through the national press coverage the case attracted.
What Happened Inside the Courtroom
The trial ran from July 10 to July 21, 1925. Hundreds of journalists, curiosity seekers, vendors, and evangelists descended on Dayton, a town of about 1,800. Chicago’s WGN radio broadcast the proceedings live, the first live radio broadcast of a trial in American history. When July heat and the crush of spectators became unbearable inside the Rhea County Courthouse, Judge John Raulston moved the trial to a wooden platform outdoors.
Darrow’s strategy depended on calling scientists and theologians to testify that evolutionary theory was widely accepted and not inherently incompatible with religious faith. The prosecution objected, and Raulston sided with them. Only one expert, a zoology professor, testified at all, and he did so with the jury out of the room. The judge ultimately excluded expert testimony from the trial, though he allowed the defense to enter written statements into the record for use on appeal.2University of Minnesota Law Library. The Struggle Over Expert Testimony
Darrow Puts Bryan on the Stand
With his scientific witnesses shut out, Darrow made an unusual move. He called William Jennings Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed, and the examination that followed ran nearly two hours in the outdoor heat.
Darrow pressed Bryan on whether he took every word of scripture literally. Bryan insisted the Bible should be “accepted as it is given” while conceding some passages were illustrative. Darrow walked him through specific episodes: Did a great fish really swallow Jonah? Did Joshua literally command the sun to stand still? Was Eve created from Adam’s rib? Where did Cain find a wife?3UMKC School of Law. Scopes Trial – Day 7
Bryan handled some questions confidently and stumbled on others. Asked about the age of the earth, he admitted he believed it was far older than a literal reading of Genesis implied. Asked whether the six days of creation might have been longer periods of time, Bryan replied, “My impression is they were periods.” The exchange grew heated, with Bryan accusing Darrow of insulting believers and Darrow firing back that Bryan insulted “every man of science and learning in the world.”3UMKC School of Law. Scopes Trial – Day 7
The judge struck Bryan’s testimony from the record the next day. Legally, it changed nothing.
The Verdict and the Technicality That Undid It
On the final day, Darrow asked the jury to return a guilty verdict. This was calculated: only a conviction could be appealed, and the defense wanted a higher court to strike down the Butler Act. The jury deliberated for nine minutes and found Scopes guilty. Judge Raulston imposed the statute’s minimum fine of $100.
That fine turned out to be a fatal error. Under the Tennessee Constitution, any fine over $50 had to be set by the jury, not the judge. In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the Butler Act itself but reversed Scopes’ conviction on this technicality. The court noted that Scopes had left teaching and recommended the attorney general drop the matter, which he did.4UMKC School of Law. Scopes v. State – Tennessee Supreme Court Decision
The dismissal meant the ACLU never got the federal constitutional ruling it wanted. The broader question of whether a state could bar evolution from classrooms went unresolved.
What Happened Afterward
William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton five days after the trial ended. He was 65. It was his final public act.
Scopes never returned to teaching. He enrolled at the University of Chicago, earned a graduate degree in geology, and spent his career in the oil industry, mostly in Venezuela. He retired in 1963.
The practical effect on classrooms was chilling. Even though Scopes’ conviction was overturned, textbook publishers quietly removed or downplayed evolution for years to avoid similar controversies. Tennessee’s Butler Act stayed on the books, unenforced but unrepealed, until May 17, 1967. Repeal came only after a new teacher filed a lawsuit challenging the law and legislators decided the state could not endure the embarrassment of another evolution trial.
The Legal Legacy
The constitutional question the Scopes trial failed to resolve took another 43 years to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1968, the Court decided Epperson v. Arkansas, striking down an Arkansas statute nearly identical to the Butler Act. The Court held that banning the teaching of evolution violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the law’s purpose was to advance a particular religious belief about human origins.
Opponents of evolution then shifted strategies, backing laws that required schools to give “equal time” to biblical creationism whenever evolution was taught. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s version of this approach in Edwards v. Aguillard, holding that requiring “creation science” alongside evolution lacked any legitimate secular purpose and amounted to an endorsement of religion.5Justia Supreme Court. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 US 578
The next iteration was “intelligent design,” which framed the idea of a supernatural creator in scientific-sounding language while avoiding explicit references to God or the Bible. In 2005, a federal court in Pennsylvania rejected this approach in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. After a six-week trial, the judge concluded in a 139-page opinion that intelligent design “is not science” and could not be separated from its creationist origins. Requiring its inclusion in science classes was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.6Justia Law. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., 400 F Supp 2d 707
Each of these rulings traced back to the question the Scopes trial first raised in 1925: can the government exclude scientific ideas from the classroom to protect religious beliefs? The answer, built across decades, was no.
The Trial vs. Inherit the Wind
Much of what people think they know about the Scopes trial comes not from the historical record but from Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that was adapted into a 1960 film. The play used the trial as a frame for a story about intellectual freedom during the McCarthy era and took significant liberties with the facts. Its version of Bryan, renamed “Matthew Harrison Brady,” was a blustering fanatic who collapsed and died in the courtroom. Its version of Dayton was populated by hostile, ignorant townsfolk. The real Dayton was more curious than menacing, and the real Bryan was a more complex figure than the caricature the play presented.
The gap matters because Inherit the Wind became the primary way most Americans encountered the story for decades. The actual trial was messier and more politically calculated than the version that entered popular culture. The businessmen at Robinson’s Drug Store wanted publicity for their town. The ACLU wanted a test case for the Supreme Court and never got one. Darrow’s examination of Bryan was devastating theater but legally meaningless. And the law the whole spectacle was meant to challenge survived for another 42 years after the verdict.