The Scopes Trial was the 1925 Tennessee prosecution of high school substitute teacher John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in violation of a state law that banned it. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, the Tennessee Supreme Court later threw out the conviction on a procedural error, and the underlying law stayed on the books for another four decades. The verdict mattered less than what the case set in motion: the first live radio broadcast of a trial, a nationally watched clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, and a constitutional argument over religion in public schools that federal courts were still answering eighty years later.
The Law That Made the Case Possible
Tennessee’s legislature passed the Butler Act in March 1925. It made it a misdemeanor for any teacher at a publicly funded school or university to teach that humans descended from lower animals rather than being divinely created, and it carried a fine between $100 and $500 per offense.1University of Washington. Tennessee Code – The Butler Act The target was Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which had become standard in biology textbooks by the 1920s.
The bill’s sponsor, state representative John Washington Butler, framed the law as protecting taxpayers from having their children taught ideas that contradicted their religious beliefs. That framing became the prosecution’s legal position: the case wasn’t about science or religion, it was about whether the people paying for schools got to decide what was taught in them.
A Test Case by Design
The American Civil Liberties Union wanted the Butler Act challenged in court. On May 4, 1925, the ACLU ran an advertisement in the Chattanooga Daily Times offering to finance a test case against the law.2Tennessee Virtual Archive. The Scopes Monkey Trial They needed a defendant willing to be charged.
George Rappleyea, a mining engineer in Dayton, saw the advertisement as a way to put his town on the map. He recruited John T. Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old football coach who had occasionally filled in as a substitute biology teacher. Scopes agreed to serve as the defendant, though he later admitted he wasn’t sure he had actually taught evolution during his substituting. The state-approved textbook he used, George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology, contained a section on evolution, and whether Scopes personally covered that chapter was almost beside the point. The case was built to test the law.
Darrow, Bryan, and a National Audience
Both sides brought in national figures. The ACLU secured Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense attorney in the country and a committed agnostic. The prosecution landed William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, former Secretary of State, and devout Presbyterian who had spent years campaigning against the teaching of evolution.
Chicago’s WGN became the first radio station to broadcast a trial live, running telephone lines into Dayton at a cost of over $1,000 per day. H.L. Mencken, covering the case for the Baltimore Evening Sun, gave it the nickname that stuck: the “Monkey Trial.” Journalists filed more than two million words about the proceeding, and the whole country followed along.
The Arguments Inside the Courtroom
The prosecution kept its case narrow. The state funded public schools, the elected legislature set the curriculum, and a teacher who defied that curriculum had broken the law. Whether evolution was scientifically valid was irrelevant to whether Scopes had violated the Butler Act.
The defense wanted the Butler Act itself on trial. Darrow’s team argued the law violated the separation of church and state by giving preference to a specific religious account of human origins, and that it violated academic freedom. They lined up expert witnesses, including zoologists, geologists, a rabbi, and two ministers, to testify about the scientific validity of evolution and its compatibility with religious faith.
Judge John T. Raulston blocked nearly all of it. He ruled the expert testimony irrelevant to the narrow legal question of whether Scopes had broken the law, though he allowed the defense to submit the experts’ written statements into the trial record, which journalists then reported widely. That ruling gutted the defense’s plan and forced Darrow’s next move.
Darrow’s Cross-Examination of Bryan
With his expert witnesses sidelined, Darrow called William Jennings Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible. Bryan could have refused. He accepted. The courtroom was so packed and the July heat so oppressive that the judge moved the proceedings onto the courthouse lawn, where several thousand people watched.
Darrow pressed Bryan on the literal truth of biblical stories: Jonah and the great fish, Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, the date of the Great Flood, the age of the earth. The pivotal moment came on the six days of creation. Darrow asked whether they were literal twenty-four-hour days. Bryan said they were not. “My impression is they were periods,” he conceded. If the Bible’s days could be interpreted as long geological periods, then scripture required interpretation, which was precisely the defense’s point.
The exchange lasted hours. Bryan grew visibly frustrated and at one point accused Darrow of trying to “slur the Bible.” Darrow answered that he was trying to prevent “bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.” Whatever the jury decided, the public argument was already over.
The Verdict, the Fine, and Bryan’s Death
The jury deliberated for nine minutes and found Scopes guilty. Judge Raulston imposed the minimum fine of $100, roughly equivalent to $1,900 today.1University of Washington. Tennessee Code – The Butler Act Darrow had expected the conviction and wanted it, because a guilty verdict was the only path to an appeal.
Five days after the trial ended, Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton at age sixty-five. The cause was listed as apoplexy. He had been exhausted from the trial and the heat, and had been in declining health for years.
The Appeal and the Reversal
The defense appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, hoping to have the Butler Act struck down. The 1927 decision split the difference.
On the constitutional question, the court upheld the Butler Act. Chief Justice Grafton Green wrote that the state, as an employer funding public schools, had the authority to dictate what its teachers could and could not teach. The relationship between the state and its teachers was treated as an employment matter, not a question of free speech or religious establishment.
On the conviction, the court reversed. Under the Tennessee Constitution, any fine exceeding $50 had to be assessed by the jury, not the judge. The Butler Act’s minimum fine was $100, and Judge Raulston had imposed it himself. That procedural error was enough. Rather than send the case back for a new trial, the court recommended the state drop the matter, noting that Scopes had left his teaching position and that “nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” The attorney general agreed, and the charges were dismissed.
The Legal Legacy
The Butler Act stayed on Tennessee’s books for another four decades, though it was never again used to prosecute a teacher. The legislature repealed it in 1967, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court settled the broader question.
In 1968, the Court decided Epperson v. Arkansas, striking down an Arkansas anti-evolution statute that had been modeled directly on the Butler Act. The Court held that the law existed for one reason: because a particular religious group considered evolution incompatible with the Book of Genesis. That motivation violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. A state’s authority to set school curricula “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 run counter to the principles of the First Amendment.”3Justia. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97
Opponents of evolution then shifted from banning it to requiring alternatives alongside it. Louisiana passed a law mandating that “creation science” receive equal classroom time whenever evolution was taught. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck that law down in Edwards v. Aguillard, finding that creation science was a religious belief rather than a scientific theory, and that requiring its instruction in public schools violated the Establishment Clause.4Justia. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578
The next version rebranded creationism as “intelligent design,” dropping explicit references to God or the Bible while keeping the claim that life was too complex to have arisen through natural processes. In 2005, a federal court in Pennsylvania heard Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and concluded, in a 139-page opinion, that intelligent design was not science. The court found it was a relabeling of creationism and that the school board’s policy requiring its mention in biology classes was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.5Justia. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707
Each of these cases traced back to Dayton. The Scopes Trial itself resolved almost nothing legally. The conviction was overturned on a technicality, the Butler Act survived, and Bryan’s argument that taxpayers should control school curricula never got a definitive constitutional answer in 1925. What the case did was put the question on the national stage. Every later attempt to keep evolution out of classrooms, or to fold religious instruction into them, ran into the principle the defense had argued in Dayton: the government cannot use public schools to advance a religious viewpoint.