The “Scopes Trial” , often called the “Scopes Monkey Trial” pitted lawyers William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow against each other (the latter representing teacher John Thomas Scopes) in an American legal case that tested a law passed on March 13, 1925 in Tennessee, which forbade the teaching, in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee, of “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”(Linder, 2000). The cast of characters that are involved in the trial are many and varied. Each one involved has a personality that partially explains their deep commitment to their views, and their positions on evolution.
The author of the law was John Washington Butler, a tobacco farmer elected to the Tennessee Legislature from his district close to the capital, Nashville. He was Primitive Baptist preacher who wrote the law upon that John Scopes would be charged with violating. “I wrote it out just like I wanted it,” Butler said at the time of the trial, “and that’s the way the law stands now, just the way I first wrote it.” The law, as Butler drafted it, made it “unlawful for any teacher” in state-supported schools “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.” Teachers who violated the law were subject to a maximum fine of $500.
William Jennings Bryan was the visiting attorney for the prosecution. Baptist pastor William Bell Riley, the founder and president of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, was instrumental in calling lawyer and three-time Democratic presidential candidate and lifelong Presbyterian, William Jennings Bryan to act as that organization’s counsel. This was an advocate’s role that he relished. By 1920, Bryan identified evolution as “the most paralyzing influence with which civilization has had to contend during the last century.” The next year, he stepped to prominence on the issue when he published a full-fledged attack on evolution in a pamphlet, “The Menace of Darwinism.” In his pamphlet, distributed throughout the country, Bryan warned, “Under the pretense of teaching science, instructors who draw their salaries from the public treasury are undermining the religious faith of students by substituting belief in Darwinism for belief in the Bible.” He argued that persons “who worship brute ancestors” should “build their own colleges and employ their own teachers” rather than use the public schools to preach their “godless doctrine.” For Bryan, opposition to the teaching of evolution sprung almost as much from his deep-seated majoritarian instincts as from his worries about the “consummately dangerous” theory. The prosecution team was led by Tom Stewart, district attorney for the 18th Circuit (and future United States Senator), and included, in addition to Bryan and Herbert and Sue Hicks, Ben B. McKenzie and William Jennings Bryan, Jr.
Clarence Darrow, the attorney for the defense, was influenced by the times: a time of class conflict so intense as to border on class warfare, a time of Jim Crow and of unprecedented xenophobia, a time when the modernist notion of asking whether a behavior pleased one’s own intellect began to challenge the Victorian way of asking whether the behavior was approved of by society. He was also influenced by Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Invariably, he saw his client’s cases as inextricably linked to these large philosophical and social issues. Unlike most attorneys, Darrow fought his battles not just for his clients, but also for the hearts and minds of the American people. Darrow believed, as did most people in the early twentieth-century that intellectual battles could be won, not just fought. He felt strongly that science could beat fundamentalism (or that Fundamentalism could beat Science), that trade unionism would win (or trade unionism could be routed—there seemed no middle way. the defense team consisted of Darrow, ACLU attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, and Dudley Field Malone, an international divorce lawyer who had worked with Bryan in the State Department while Bryan was Secretary of State.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had offered to defend anyone accused of teaching the theory of evolution in defiance of the Butler Act. George Rappleyea, who managed a number of local mines, convinced a group of businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee, then a town of 1,800, that the controversy of such a trial would put Dayton on the map. With their agreement, he called in his friend, 24-year-old John T. Scopes, who was the Rhea County High School’s football coach who had substituted for the principal in a science class. Rappleyea asked Scopes to teach Darwinism (Linder, 2000).
George Rappleyea a resident of Dayton, TN, was the primary force in getting the trial
staged in the town. The most prominent reason was that he recognized that the community could benefit economically from having what he knew would be a big trial in Dayton. The next day Rappleyea met with a group of influential leaders that regularly had coffee at Robinson’s Drug Store in Dayton, Tennessee and proposed his idea of challenging the law. At this time, the village was having hard economic times so the group recognized the possible significance of the idea. They decided that biology teacher John Scopes would be a good candidate to challenge the law. They sent a boy to find him on the tennis court and invited him to the discussion. He heard the proposal and felt sympathetic to the idea. He admitted to having taught evolution to his students. Of late, this was found to be a possible fabrication. With this agreement, Rappleyea arranged to have Scopes arrested for disobeying the Butler Law. When the word got out about the case, William Jennings Bryan, a very religious believer in the Bible and its creation teachings decided to volunteer to prosecute the case. Byran was noted as the best orator of his day and had been a candidate for the United States presidency on 2 occasions.
Rappleyea went to New York City to discuss the situation with the ACLU and get their financial assistance for a defending lawyer. When Clarence Darrow heard that Bryan was going to prosecute the case, he volunteered to be the defending lawyer. This set the stage for the “trial of the century”.
The ACLU had originally intended to oppose the Butler Act on the grounds that it violated the separation of Church and State within the public education system and was therefore unconstitutional. Mainly due to Clarence Darrow, this strategy changed as the trial progressed, and the earliest argument proposed by the defense once the trial had started was that there was actually no conflict between evolution and the creation account in the Bible. In support of this claim, they brought in eight experts on evolution. Other than Dr. Maynard Metcalf, the Judge would not allow these experts to testify in person. Instead, they were allowed to submit written statements so that their evidence could be used at the appeal. In response to this decision, Darrow made a sarcastic comment to Judge Ralston, for which he apologized the next day keeping himself from being found in contempt of court. By the latter stages of the trial, Clarence Darrow had largely abandoned the ACLU’s original strategy and attacked the literal interpretation of the Bible as well as Bryan’s limited knowledge of other religions and science.
Only when the case went to appeal, did the defense return to the original claim that the prosecution was invalid because the law was essentially designed to benefit a particular religious group, which would be unconstitutional. To support his contention that evolution was morally pernicious, Bryan cited the famous Leopold-Loeb trial involving Darrow the year before the Scopes Trial. Darrow had saved two rich young child murderers from the death sentence, and Bryan cited Darrow‘s own words:
This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor … Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s [evolutionary] philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … It is hardly fair to hang a 19–year–old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university. Malone responded for the defense in a speech that was universally considered the oratorical triumph of the trial. Arousing fears of “inquisitions,” Malone argued that the Bible should be preserved in the realm of theology and morality and not put into a course of science. In his gale-force conclusion, Malone declared that Bryan’s “duel to the death” against evolution should not be made one-sided by a court ruling that took away the chief witnesses for the defense. Malone promised that there would be no duel because “There is never a duel with the truth.” The courtroom went wild when Malone finished and Scopes himself declared Malone’s speech to be the dramatic highpoint of the entire trial and insisted that part of the reason Bryan wanted to go on the stand was to regain some of his tarnished glory. On the sixth day of the trial the defense ran out of witnesses. The judge declared that all of the defense testimony on the Bible was irrelevant, and should not be presented to the jury (which had been excluded during the defense). He declared that the Bible in question was the official Bible of the State of Tennessee, and that this was the King James version. One of the defense attorneys, probably Darrow, asked “Where are we to find an expert on the Bible who is acceptable to the court?” Bryan interjected “I am an expert on the Bible.” Thus Bryan volunteered to be a defense witness. On the seventh day of the trial, Clarence Darrow took the unorthodox step of calling William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the prosecution, to the stand as a witness in an effort to demonstrate that belief in the historicity of the Bible and its many accounts of miracles was unreasonable. Bryan accepted, on the understanding that Darrow would in turn submit to questioning by Bryan.
Darrow questioned the story of Jonah, the account of the Earth standing still, and the Usher chronology. Bryan responded by steadfastly adhering to belief in the reported miracles, but asserted that he did not know how old the Earth was, as the Usher chronology was only a calculation of men. When asked to explain the use of the word “Day” in the first chapter, he said: I have not attempted to explain it. If you will take the second chapter—let me have the book. The fourth verse of the second chapter says: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,” the word “day” there in the very next chapter is used to describe a period. I do not see that there is any necessity for construing the words, “the evening and the morning,” as meaning necessarily a twenty-four-hour day, “in the day when the Lord made the heaven and the earth.” The questioning continued into whether Eve was actually created from Adam’s rib, where Cain got his wife, and how many people lived in Ancient Egypt. The celebrated “duel in the shade” was very heated with Darrow telling Bryan, “You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.” In response Bryan declared: “The reason I am answering is not for the benefit of the superior court. It is to keep these gentlemen from saying I was afraid to meet them and let them question me, and I want the Christian world to know that any atheist, agnostic, unbeliever, can question me anytime as to my belief in God, and I will answer him.” Bryan, gauging the effect the session was having, snapped that its purpose was “to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible.”
Darrow, with equal vehemence, retorted, “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.” The confrontation between Bryan and Darrow lasted for approximately two hours on the afternoon of the seventh day of the trial. It is likely that it would have continued the following morning, but for Judge Ralston’s announcement that he considered the whole examination irrelevant to the case and his decision that it should be “expunged” from the record. Thus Bryan was denied the chance to cross-examine the defense lawyers in return, and the defense’s final attempt to present evidence was denied. In response, Darrow asked the judge to bring in the jury only to have them come to a guilty verdict: We claim that the defendant is not guilty, but as the court has excluded any testimony, except as to the one issue as to whether he taught that man descended from a lower order of animals, and we cannot contradict that testimony, there is no logical thing to come except that the jury find a verdict that we may carry to the higher court, purely as a matter of proper procedure. We do not think it is fair to the court or counsel on the other side to waste a lot of time when we know this is the inevitable result and probably the best result for the case. After they were brought in, Darrow then addressed the jury, telling them that: We came down here to offer evidence in this case and the court has held under the law that the evidence we had is not admissible, so all we can do is to take an exception and carry it to a higher court to see whether the evidence is admissible or not. . . . we cannot even explain to you that we think you should return a verdict of not guilty. We do not see how you could. We do not ask it. Darrow closed the case for the defense without a final summation. Under Tennessee law, when the defense waived its right to make a closing speech, the prosecution was also barred from summing up its case.
Scopes himself never testified, as there was never a legal issue as to whether he had taught evolution. Scopes later admitted that, in reality, he was unsure of whether or not he had taught evolution, but the point was not contested at the trial.
After eight days of trial, it took the jury only nine minutes to deliberate. Scopes was found guilty on July 21 and ordered to pay a US $100.00 fine.
Scopes’ lawyers appealed, challenging the conviction on several grounds. First, they argued that the statute was overly vague because it prohibited the teaching of “evolution,” a very broad term. The Court rejected that argument, holding: “Evolution, like prohibition, is a broad term. In recent bickering, however, evolution has been understood to mean the theory which holds that man has developed from some pre-existing lower type. This is the popular significance of evolution, just as the popular significance of prohibition is prohibition of the traffic in intoxicating liquors. It was in that sense that evolution was used in this act. It is in this sense that the word will be used in this opinion, unless the context otherwise indicates. It is only to the theory of the evolution of man from a lower type that the act before us was intended to apply, and much of the discussion we have heard is beside this case.” Second, the lawyers argued that the statute violated Scopes’ rights under the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as it prohibited him from teaching evolution. The court rejected this argument, holding that the state was permitted to regulate his speech as an employee of the state: “He was an employee of the state of Tennessee or of a municipal agency of the state. He was under contract with the state to work in an institution of the state. He had no right or privilege to serve the state except upon such terms as the state prescribed. His liberty, his privilege, his immunity to teach and proclaim the theory of evolution, elsewhere than in the service of the state, was in no wise touched by this law.”
Third, it was argued that the terms of the Butler Act violated the Tennessee constitutional clause providing: “It shall be the duty of the General Assembly in all future periods of this government, to cherish literature and science.” The argument was that the theory of the descent of man from a lower order of animals was now established by the preponderance of scientific thought, and that the prohibition of the teaching of such theory was a violation of the legislative duty to cherish science. The court rejected this argument (Scopes v State, 154 Tenn. 105, 1927), holding that the determination of what laws cherished science was an issue for the legislature, not the judiciary: “The courts cannot sit in judgment on such acts of the Legislature or its agents and determine whether or not the omission or addition of a particular course of study tends ‘to cherish science.'”
Fourth, the defense lawyers argued that the statute violated the Establishment Clause, unconstitutionally establishing a state religion. The Court rejected this argument, holding that the Establishment Clause was designed to prevent the establishment of a state religion as had been the experience in England and Scotland at the writing of the constitution, and held: “We are not able to see how the prohibition of teaching the theory that man has descended from a lower order of animals gives preference to any religious establishment or mode of worship. So far as we know, there is no religious establishment or organized body that has in its creed or confession of faith any article denying or affirming such a theory. So far as we know, the denial or affirmation of such a theory does not enter into any recognized mode of worship. Since this cause has been pending in this court, we have been favored, in addition to briefs of counsel and various amici curiae, with a multitude of resolutions, addresses, and communications from scientific bodies, religious factions, and individuals giving us the benefit of their views upon the theory of evolution. Examination of these contributions indicates that Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are divided among themselves in their beliefs, and that there is no unanimity among the members of any religious establishment as to this subject. Belief or unbelief in the theory of evolution is no more a characteristic of any religious establishment or mode of worship than is belief or unbelief in the wisdom of the prohibition laws. It would appear that members of the same churches quite generally disagree as to these things.”
Further, the Court held that while the statute forbade the teaching of evolution (as the Court had defined it), it did not require the teaching of any other doctrine, so that it did not benefit any doctrine over the others. Nevertheless, having found the statute to be constitutional, the Court set aside the conviction on appeal due to a legal technicality: the jury should have decided the fine, not the judge, as Tennessee judges could not at that time set fines above 50 dollars. The prosecution did not seek a retrial (Scopes Trial).
References:
Scopes Trial. Wikipedia, The Free encyclopedia. [Database] from http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Main_Page
Linder, D. The Scopes Trial. Famous Trials in American History. Tennessee vs. John
Scopes “The Monkey Trial”. 1925. Retrieved March 30, 2007 from http://www.law.
umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm
