The Scopes Trial was the July 1925 prosecution of Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes for teaching human evolution in violation of the state’s Butler Act. It was a deliberately staged test case, argued by Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, that ended in a guilty verdict and a $100 fine. The Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the conviction on a procedural technicality without ruling on the constitutional questions, and the anti-evolution statute stayed on the books for another four decades.
The Law Scopes Was Charged With Breaking
The statute at the center of the case was Chapter 27 of the Public Acts of Tennessee for 1925, known as the Butler Act after its legislative sponsor. It made it a misdemeanor for any teacher in a state-funded school to teach a theory denying the biblical account of human creation, or to teach that humans descended from a lower order of animals.1UMKC School of Law. Tennessee Evolution Statutes The prohibition applied to every public university, normal school, and K–12 classroom that received state money.
The penalty was a fine of $100 to $500 per offense.2University of Washington. Tennessee Public Acts of 1925 Chapter 27 – The Butler Act No jail time. Enforcement fell on individual teachers, not administrators or textbook publishers, and the practical effect was that biology teachers had to skip evolution chapters in books the state itself had already approved.
How the Case Was Engineered
The prosecution was not spontaneous. The ACLU had publicly offered to defend any Tennessee teacher willing to be charged under the new law. In Dayton, a struggling town in Rhea County, mining manager George Rappleyea saw a chance to draw reporters and visitors to a place that needed both. He gathered local leaders at Robinson’s Drug Store and persuaded them to recruit a defendant.
They chose John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old who had just finished his first year at Rhea County High School. Scopes taught math and physics and coached football. He was not the regular biology teacher. He had substituted in a biology class for a few weeks that spring and later said he was not sure he had actually covered evolution during that stretch.3TeVA. The Scopes Monkey Trial – Section: The Dayton Challenge It did not matter. He agreed to be charged so the challenge could go forward, and a warrant was sworn out.
Darrow, Bryan, and Eight Days in Dayton
Clarence Darrow, the country’s best-known trial lawyer and an outspoken agnostic fresh off the Leopold and Loeb defense, volunteered to lead Scopes’s team. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, former Secretary of State, and by 1925 a leading voice of the fundamentalist movement, joined the prosecution. Bryan framed the case as a defense of democratic control over public schools. Darrow saw it as a chance to put religious literalism itself on the witness stand.
The trial opened on July 10, 1925, before Judge John T. Raulston. Hundreds of reporters filed in, vendors set up on the streets, and Chicago’s WGN carried the proceedings live, the first American trial ever broadcast on radio.4American Experience. WGN Radio Broadcasts the Trial The courtroom filled so completely that Judge Raulston moved the proceedings out to the courthouse lawn, worried the floor might give way.
The Ruling That Gutted the Defense
Darrow’s plan was to put evolutionary science on trial alongside Scopes. He had lined up at least six expert witnesses, including zoologists, geologists, and clergy, to testify that evolution was sound science and could be reconciled with religious belief. Judge Raulston ruled the testimony inadmissible. The only question for the jury, he held, was whether Scopes had taught evolution in violation of the Butler Act, not whether evolution was true. The experts were permitted to file written statements for the appellate record, but the jury never heard them.
Darrow Calls Bryan to the Stand
With his scientific witnesses blocked, Darrow made an unusual move on July 20: he called Bryan himself as an expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed. For roughly two hours in the outdoor heat, Darrow pressed him on literal interpretation. Did Jonah live inside a whale? Was the Earth created in six 24-hour days? How old was the Earth? Bryan held firm on some points but conceded on others, allowing that the six days of creation might not have been literal days. The next morning, Judge Raulston struck the entire exchange from the record as irrelevant. By then reporters had already sent every word out to a national audience.
The Verdict and the Fine
On July 21, 1925, Darrow asked the jury to return a guilty verdict. The reason was tactical: a conviction was necessary to create a case that could be appealed. The jury deliberated for nine minutes and found Scopes guilty.5PBS. Timeline: Monkey Trial Judge Raulston imposed a fine of $100, the minimum the statute allowed.1UMKC School of Law. Tennessee Evolution Statutes
The Appeal and Reversal
The defense took the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, hoping for a ruling that the Butler Act violated free speech protections or the separation of church and state. In Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105 (1927), the court refused to reach those questions and reversed on a narrow procedural ground.6vLex United States. Scopes v. State
The problem was who had set the fine. Under Article 6, Section 14 of the Tennessee Constitution, any fine over $50 had to be fixed by the jury, not the judge. Because the Butler Act’s minimum was $100, the jury should have determined the amount, and Judge Raulston had done it himself. Since the statute allowed nothing below $100, the court could not cure the error by simply reducing the penalty. The conviction had to be thrown out.7UMKC School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v. The State
Rather than send the case back for retrial, the court recommended that the attorney general enter a nolle prosequi and drop the matter, noting that Scopes was no longer teaching in Tennessee and that “nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” The attorney general did so. The Butler Act stayed on the books, but no one was ever prosecuted under it again.
What the Trial Did and Didn’t Settle
The Scopes Trial produced no binding ruling on whether states could ban the teaching of evolution. Because the reversal turned on the mechanics of the fine, the constitutional questions Darrow wanted decided went unanswered.
The Butler Act itself was repealed on September 1, 1967. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court reached the constitutional issue in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), striking down an Arkansas statute that made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. The Court held that the law violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause because it existed solely to serve a religious purpose. A state’s authority over curriculum, the Court wrote, “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.”8Justia. Epperson v. Arkansas
The fight shifted in the 1980s. Instead of banning evolution, several states required “creation science” to be taught alongside it. Louisiana’s Creationism Act did exactly that, and the Supreme Court struck it down in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). The Court found the statute’s stated goal of “protecting academic freedom” was a pretext. In practice, the law gave a persuasive advantage to a religious doctrine by pairing evolution with creationism whenever evolution was taught, with no matching requirement in the other direction. Its primary purpose was to endorse the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind, and the Establishment Clause does not permit that.9Justia. Edwards v. Aguillard
The legal work Darrow set out to do in 1925 was finished by other lawyers 43 and 62 years later. What Dayton produced was something different: the first mass-audience collision between fundamentalist religion and modern science, argued live on the radio, on a courthouse lawn, in a case that on its own terms decided almost nothing.