The Scopes Trial was the 1925 criminal prosecution of Tennessee high school teacher John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in a public school classroom, in violation of a state law that made doing so a crime. Held in Dayton, Tennessee, and nicknamed the “Monkey Trial,” it became the first American trial broadcast live on radio and the country’s first mass-audience legal battle over what public schools are allowed to teach. The verdict itself was narrow and quickly reversed on a technicality, but the case forced a national argument over whether elected officials can use the law to keep scientific ideas out of classrooms because those ideas conflict with religious belief.
The Law Scopes Was Charged Under
Tennessee enacted the Anti-Evolution Act in March 1925, recorded as Chapter 27 of the Public Acts of Tennessee for 1925 and commonly called the Butler Act after its author, Representative John Washington Butler. It made it illegal for any teacher at a publicly funded school to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”1UMKC School of Law. Tennessee Evolution Statutes A violation carried a fine of $100 to $500. The bill passed with little opposition and reflected a broader movement in several states during the 1920s to keep evolution out of public education.
How the Case Was Engineered
No parent complained. No prosecutor built the case on their own initiative. On May 5, 1925, local engineer George Rappleyea gathered several prominent Dayton figures at Robinson’s Drug Store, including school superintendent Walter White and lawyer Sue K. Hicks, and proposed staging a test case against the Butler Act to put the struggling town on the map. The American Civil Liberties Union had already announced it would fund the defense of any Tennessee teacher willing to challenge the law.
The group recruited John T. Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old who taught math, physics, and chemistry at the local high school. Scopes was not the regular biology teacher. He had briefly substituted for the biology instructor and later said he could not recall whether he had actually taught evolution during that time.2Tennessee Virtual Archive. The Scopes Monkey Trial He agreed to say he had, and the organizers arranged his arrest.
What began as a marketing scheme drew reporters from across the country. Nearly a thousand people crammed into the Rhea County Courthouse on the first day. Chicago radio station WGN placed microphones throughout the courtroom and carried the proceedings live, the first time an American trial reached a radio audience.
Bryan Versus Darrow
Two of the most famous men in American public life took opposite sides. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State, joined the prosecution as a volunteer. He had spent years campaigning against evolution and framed the case as a matter of democratic self-government: Tennessee’s Christian majority funded the public schools and had the right to decide what they taught.
Clarence Darrow, the most renowned trial lawyer of his era and an outspoken agnostic, led the defense without a fee. He viewed the Butler Act as a threat to intellectual freedom itself. The two men disliked each other personally and said so publicly, which guaranteed the trial would run hotter than the underlying misdemeanor charge warranted.
The Defense Blocked, Then Bryan on the Stand
The narrow legal question was whether Scopes had violated the Butler Act. The defense wanted to argue something much larger: that evolution was sound science, compatible with religious faith, and that the Butler Act itself was unconstitutional. Darrow’s team assembled eight scientific experts to testify. Judge John T. Raulston refused to let any of them appear before the jury, ruling that the only issue was whether Scopes had broken the law, not whether the law was wise. The defense read excerpts of the experts’ prepared statements into the record for appeal purposes only.3UMKC School of Law. Scopes Trial – Biographies of Defense Experts
With his experts blocked, Darrow did something no one expected. He called William Jennings Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and Bryan accepted. Darrow pressed him on whether he read scripture literally, on the age of the Earth, on Archbishop James Ussher’s calculation of 4004 B.C., on the days of creation, and on the Great Flood. Bryan hedged, called the Ussher date “the estimate of a man that is accepted today” without vouching for it, and grew visibly frustrated. He accused Darrow of trying to “slur at the Bible.” Darrow answered that he was examining Bryan on “your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.” The exchange did nothing to help Scopes on the charge, but it accomplished what Darrow wanted: a national audience watched the country’s foremost defender of biblical literalism struggle to sustain a rigid literal reading under questioning.
Verdict and Appeal
The jury deliberated nine minutes and found Scopes guilty. Judge Raulston imposed the minimum fine of $100, equivalent to roughly $1,900 today.4UMKC School of Law. Scopes Trial – Day 8 The defense appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, hoping to force a ruling on whether the Butler Act itself was constitutional.
They did not get one. In 1927, the state high court upheld the Butler Act as a valid exercise of legislative power. But it reversed Scopes’ conviction on a technicality: under Tennessee’s constitution, any fine over $50 had to be set by the jury, not the judge. Because the judge himself had imposed the $100 fine, he had exceeded his authority. The court recommended the state drop the case rather than retry it, writing that “nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.”5UMKC School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v. The State The prosecution complied. The constitutional questions the defense wanted decided were left untouched.
What Happened After the Trial
William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton five days after the trial ended. He had stayed in town to finalize a closing argument he never delivered, because Darrow had waived closing arguments to deny Bryan the last word.
Scopes left teaching. He went to graduate school in geology at the University of Chicago and spent the rest of his career in the oil and gas industry. The Butler Act itself stayed on Tennessee’s books for more than four decades. The legislature repealed it on May 13, 1967.
The Constitutional Questions, Resolved Later
Because the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed on a technicality, Scopes never produced a definitive ruling on whether states could ban evolution from public schools. That took another forty years and a line of federal cases.
Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)
The U.S. Supreme Court addressed evolution bans directly for the first time in Epperson v. Arkansas. Arkansas had a statute nearly identical to the Butler Act, and the Court struck it down unanimously. A state’s power to set school curricula, the Court held, “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 sole purpose of the Arkansas law, the Court found, was to suppress a scientific idea because it conflicted with “a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group,” which violated the Establishment Clause’s requirement of governmental neutrality toward religion.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)
Edwards v. Aguillard (1987)
After Epperson, some states shifted tactics. Louisiana passed a “Creationism Act” requiring that creationism receive equal classroom time whenever evolution was taught. The Supreme Court struck that down too, finding the Act lacked a clear secular purpose and was designed to “discredit evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism.” The law, the Court held, impermissibly endorsed a religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind.7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987)
Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005)
The most recent major case addressed “intelligent design,” framed by its proponents as a scientific alternative to evolution. A Pennsylvania school board required biology teachers to read a statement presenting intelligent design as an alternative explanation for the origin of life. A federal district court found that intelligent design was “nothing less than the progeny of creationism,” noted that the systematic renaming from “creation” to “intelligent design” had occurred shortly after Edwards in 1987, and held that teaching it in science class violated the Establishment Clause. Intelligent design, the court concluded, involved a supernatural designer and was a religious proposition rather than a scientific theory.8Justia Law. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005)
Together, these decisions completed what the Scopes defense set out to do in 1925 but could not: establish that the government may not use public school curricula to advance religious doctrine at the expense of science.
Why the Name Still Means Something
The trial’s cultural reach has outrun its legal footprint. In 1955, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee premiered Inherit the Wind, a dramatization loosely based on the Scopes case. The play changed names and invented characters but drew key scenes nearly verbatim from the trial transcript, including portions of Darrow’s examination of Bryan. Lawrence and Lee used the 1925 story to comment on the anti-intellectual climate of the McCarthy era. The play was a critical and commercial hit, was adapted into a 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy, and remains one of the most frequently produced plays in American theater.
“Monkey Trial” has since entered the language as shorthand for any clash between science and religious authority in public institutions. A century after Scopes stood trial for a misdemeanor he may not have actually committed, the question underneath the case, over who decides what children learn and on what basis, is still live.