On This Day: Tennessee Educator Scopes Indicted for Teaching Evolution

The case of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes pitted creationists against supporters of evolution, sparring over a Tennessee antievolution law making it illegal “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," as quoted by American Heritage magazine.

The Scopes trial created a media circus, and the affair was in part a publicity stunt orchestrated by the American Civil Liberties Union to test the legality of state-imposed religious limits on teaching, according to American Heritage.

In March 1925, the ACLU advertised and found a willing plaintiff in Scopes, a high school biology teacher from Dayton, Tenn. Supporters of evolution paid his legal costs.

The trial attracted high-level supporters from both sides of the debate, and pitted two top legal minds against each other: creationist William Jennings Bryan—a three-time Democratic candidate for president—and prominent ACLU lawyer Clarence Darrow.

In an article published July 20, 1925, Time magazine described the scene at the famous trial. “A jury was sworn—ten farmers, a shipping clerk and a farmer-teacher, none of whom had ever read a book on Evolution or admitted a prejudice for or against it; all of whom, with the exception of one illiterate, had read the Bible."

In the end, Scopes was fined $100, a fee that was later voided. The conviction and the nominal penalty allowed both sides to claim victory.

The law, largely ignored and unenforced since the Scopes trial, was repealed in 1967.

The debate over the teaching of evolution still rages today. “As creationism keeps popping up in new guises, such as Creation Science and Intelligent Design, the Scopes trial gets dusted off for each new generation,” writes Frederic D. Schwarz in American Heritage.

The Scopes trial inspired many to defend their religious beliefs with song, as PBS notes in its pages on the trial, which link to tunes from the Bryan College archives in Dayton, Tenn.

Contrary to popular belief, Scopes was never in any danger of imprisonment, according to an FAQ on the Scopes trial in American Heritage, as the anti-evolution law never mentioned jail time.

In The Atlantic magazine in 2006, Amy Waldman compared terrorism trials to the Scopes affair for putting fundamentalism on trial. “In their exploration of Islam, the recent terrorism trials have had a similar, if perhaps less circuslike, feel.”

The Scopes trial arose from a "so-called ‘anti-evolution crusade’ [that] began just after World War I," according to Edward J. Larson, speaking at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "By the 1920s, both sides had carried this theological dispute into the classroom. Neither side wanted the other’s view taught as scientific fact in public school courses.”

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court “has ruled that creationism shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom, but it has never said that its mandate is to teach evolution,” notes Jane Little of the BBC. “Because certainly last year in Dayton, I was interviewing 18-year-olds who had been through the public school system and knew nothing about evolution or Darwin.”

Legislation proposed in Florida in May 2008 would require public schools to teach alternative theories of evolution. Critics felt that the law was a veiled attempt to teach religion.

The Internet Movie Database calls the 1960 film “Inherit the Wind” a “thinly disguised rendition” of the Scopes trial, as some of its debates were taken directly from the trial’s actual transcripts. The movie, starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly, was based on a 1955 play of the same name and was nominated for four Oscars.