The Scopes trial of 1925 was the Tennessee prosecution of John Thomas Scopes, a 24-year-old high school substitute teacher charged with violating a state law that banned teaching human evolution in public schools. It ran from July 10 to 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, ended in a guilty verdict, and was later reversed on a procedural error without resolving the underlying constitutional questions. Formally titled State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, the case became a national referendum on whether states could bar mainstream science from the classroom when it conflicted with religious teaching.
The Law Being Tested
Tennessee House Bill 185, signed on March 21, 1925, was known as the Butler Act after its sponsor, state legislator John Washington Butler. It made it illegal for any teacher at a publicly funded Tennessee school to teach a theory denying the biblical account of human creation, or to teach that humans descended from a lower order of animals.1Tennessee General Assembly. Tennessee Code – The Butler Act
Violations were misdemeanors carrying a fine of $100 to $500 per offense.1Tennessee General Assembly. Tennessee Code – The Butler Act The dollar amounts were small; the principle was not. Tennessee had made it a crime to present a mainstream scientific theory in a public classroom, and several other states were weighing similar bills.
How the Case Was Engineered
The American Civil Liberties Union placed an advertisement in the Chattanooga Daily Times offering to defend and finance any Tennessee teacher willing to challenge the law. Business leaders in Dayton, a small mining town in Rhea County, saw the ad and saw an opportunity to put their community on the map. They approached John Scopes, a high school football coach who occasionally filled in as a substitute science teacher.
Scopes was not certain he had actually taught evolution, but he agreed to be the defendant. The state-approved biology text, George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology, included a chapter on human evolution from earlier life forms.2Tennessee Virtual Archive. Hunter’s Civic Biology Textbook Scopes said he had taught from it, was served with a warrant, and was arrested. The whole sequence was arranged in advance to move the matter into court.
Bryan for the Prosecution, Darrow for the Defense
The prosecution brought in William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee who had spent his later years campaigning against the teaching of evolution. He believed it corroded morality and reduced human beings to animals, and he framed the case as a defense of ordinary citizens’ right to decide what their children were taught.
The defense answered with Clarence Darrow, the era’s most celebrated trial lawyer and an outspoken agnostic. Darrow joined specifically to challenge the entanglement of religion and public education. Neither man was really there to litigate whether Scopes had broken the law. Everyone knew he had. The courtroom was a stage, and the country was the audience.
p>H.L. Mencken, columnist for the Baltimore Sun, helped shape that audience. He traveled to Dayton, filed dispatches contemptuous of the prosecution and the town, and had personally urged Darrow to join the defense. His widely reprinted coverage set the trial’s image as a collision between enlightenment and fundamentalism.
The Trial as Spectacle
Scopes was the first American trial broadcast live on radio. WGN in Chicago ran a continuous feed using four microphones installed with the cooperation of Judge John T. Raulston, with the station’s 50,000-watt signal reaching listeners across nearly thirty states. The telephone lines from Dayton cost WGN more than $1,000 a day. Announcer Quin Ryan narrated and identified speakers.
Roughly two hundred reporters descended on a town of fewer than two thousand people. The July courtroom grew so dangerously crowded that Judge Raulston moved proceedings to the courthouse lawn, where several thousand spectators gathered under the trees.
Darrow Puts Bryan on the Stand
Judge Raulston opened sessions with prayer when a clergyman was present, and he barred expert scientific witnesses from testifying before the jury. He ruled their testimony irrelevant to the narrow question of whether Scopes had violated the statute. The defense had assembled scientists ready to explain evolutionary theory; none reached the jury.
Blocked from presenting scientific evidence, Darrow made an extraordinary move on the seventh day. He called Bryan himself as an expert witness on the Bible. For nearly two hours, Darrow pressed Bryan on whether he read scripture literally, asking about Jonah and the great fish, Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, the date of the Great Flood, and the age of the earth.3UMKC School of Law. Scopes Trial – Day 7
Bryan held firm on his faith but stumbled on specifics. Asked whether each day of creation was literally 24 hours, he conceded it might not have been, cutting against the strict literalism the prosecution relied on. Asked whether he had ever considered what would happen if the earth stopped rotating, he replied flatly, “No.” Darrow pressed: “Don’t you know it would have been converted into a molten mass of matter?” Bryan answered, “You testify to that when you get on the stand.”3UMKC School of Law. Scopes Trial – Day 7
The prosecution objected throughout, and Judge Raulston struck Bryan’s testimony from the record the next day. Newspapers printed the exchange anyway, and Bryan’s performance was widely read as an embarrassment for the fundamentalist position.
The Verdict and Its Reversal
There was no suspense about guilt. The defense had essentially conceded that Scopes taught from the textbook, and Darrow even asked the jury to return a guilty verdict so the case could be appealed. The jury obliged after nine minutes.4UMKC School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v The State Judge Raulston imposed a $100 fine, the statutory minimum.
That fine became the case’s undoing. The Tennessee constitution required any fine exceeding $50 to be assessed by a jury, not a judge.5Justia. Tennessee Constitution Article VI Section 14 Because the Butler Act’s minimum was $100 and the judge set the amount himself, he had exceeded his authority. When the case reached the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1927, the justices upheld the Butler Act as constitutional, ruling that the state had the right to prescribe what was taught in its public schools, but they reversed Scopes’s conviction on the procedural error.4UMKC School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v The State
Rather than order a retrial, the court suggested the attorney general drop the matter, writing, “We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” The attorney general entered a nolle prosequi, ending the prosecution.4UMKC School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v The State The constitutional questions the ACLU had wanted to litigate never reached a higher court.
What Came After
Bryan died in his sleep on July 26, 1925, five days after the verdict, likely of a stroke. Scopes left teaching, earned a geology degree, and worked in the oil industry.
The Butler Act stayed on the books for more than four decades. Tennessee repealed it on May 18, 1967, after a science teacher named Gary Scott was fired for violating it and a new legal challenge followed.
The constitutional reckoning Scopes never produced arrived through later cases. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas anti-evolution statute in Epperson v. Arkansas, holding that a state cannot prohibit the teaching of a scientific theory for reasons rooted in religious doctrine.6Justia. Epperson v Arkansas, 393 US 97 (1968) In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the Court struck down a Louisiana law requiring “creation science” to be taught alongside evolution, finding it violated the Establishment Clause because its purpose was to advance a religious belief.7Justia. Edwards v Aguillard, 482 US 578 (1987)
The cultural afterlife may rival the legal one. The 1955 play Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, dramatized a fictionalized version of the case and became one of the most performed plays in American theater. Its authors used the story to critique the McCarthy-era political climate as much as to revisit evolution. The play and the 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy fixed Scopes in the popular imagination as a parable about the cost of enforcing intellectual conformity, and the trial still serves as shorthand for the tension between scientific consensus and religious conviction in American public life.