How A Teacher Became The Center Of A Debate Over Evolution
In 1925, a teacher deliberately broke a law stating that evolution could not be taught in Tennessee classrooms. His trial rocked the nation.
The following is an excerpt from Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple.
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Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
Dayton, Tennessee, was a sleepy little town at the foot of the Cumberland Mountains, with Chattanooga to the south and Knoxville to the north. Giant maple trees shaded the two principal streets, Main and Market, and along Market, farmers could still tie up their teams at the hitching rail. There were flower boxes in the windows of the homes and pretty gardens in their backyards. If the place was known for anything, it was for the strawberries that left by railroad car each spring to be distributed nationwide. That’s all, until the blisteringly hot summer of 1925 when as many as two hundred journalists descended on a town they’d never heard of. They’d come to Day- ton to cover what otherwise might have been a forgettable local matter— something about evolution and a young high school teacher named John Thomas Scopes.
That it turned out to be the trial of the century was, at least in retrospect, entirely predictable. America was a secular country founded on the freedom to worship, or, for that matter, the freedom not to worship. The very first amendment to the Constitution asserts that Congress shall make no law establishing religion or prohibiting its free exercise; it drew a hard line, in other words, between church and state. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his Notes on the State of Virginia, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
But for many Americans, religion—specifically Protestantism—was the only safeguard against moral bankruptcy. Religion should not be separated from government; on the contrary, it should sit at its very center. For to them, America was a Christian nation with a sacred mission, conceived for and by devout men who believed they were endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Any legislation separating church and state might well be construed as antireligious, iniquitous—and even unpatriotic.
One nation, under God. One God, one nation: In 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower maintained that including the words “one nation, under God” in the pledge of allegiance would strengthen, he said, “those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource.” Without our swearing allegiance to religion, the Reverend George M. Docherty had suggested to Eisenhower, “little Muscovites,” all of them godless communists, could easily be reciting the very same loyalty oath.
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That religion and government, religious Fundamentalists and religious liberals, or even an older and a younger generation did and would vie with one another was not news. But in 1925, their antagonism possessed a force and a focus that surprised even the journalists who rented rooms in the small Tennessee town hoping for a scoop. After all, two gladiators, the ubiquitous politician William Jennings Bryan and the criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow, each of them national celebrities for decades, were going into battle over God and science and the classroom and, not incidentally, over what it meant to be an American.
For just a few months before the trial began, the Tennessee legislature had passed a law, known as the Butler Act, that forbade the teaching 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.” The fledgling American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that promised to protect the constitutional rights of citizens, claimed that the Butler Act violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. It flouted the First Amendment’s prohibition against establishing a state religion. And the Butler Act denied the right of professionals—educators—to decide for themselves, as professionals, what they should be teaching.
When the ACLU offered to defend anyone willing to test that Tennessee law by breaking it, John Scopes stepped up. Ordinarily shy, this unpretentious twenty-four- year-old admitted that not only had he taught evolution, you can’t teach biology with- out it. And in any case, the textbook that he’d used in his biology class, a textbook that the state of Tennessee had authorized, mentioned evolution only in a few pages. It said nothing about divine creation or the Bible. It had merely said that evolution was change. That was it.
Young Scopes was immediately indicted for violating the Butler Act; the trial date was set for the summer of 1925. Then the commotion began. Soon it seemed every automobile in the country, every itinerant preacher, and every snake-oil salesman was headed for Dayton, Tennessee.
“This trial was bound to take place somewhere,” a Dayton resident philosophically observed. “It’s an issue that is coming up everywhere in the United States.” As he suspected, the issue had nothing to do with whether John Scopes had broken the law. No one disputed that, not even Scopes himself. And the issue wasn’t about the theory of evolution per se. Very few people reading or writing about the Scopes trial, or even those directly involved in it, understood how evolution occurred or even how to define it. So something greater was at stake than whether a young schoolteacher had taught from an authorized textbook that mentioned evolution.
To the celebrated criminal lawyer and self-described agnostic Clarence Darrow, who volunteered to defend Scopes, the Tennessee law raised issues that went to the heart of democracy. It asked who controlled how Americans could be educated, and where and with what means, and what limitations on freedom could be or should be placed on the freedom to learn, to teach, to think, or to worship. None, he said. Agreeing with him were the other members of the defense team: the Irish Catholic Dudley Field Malone and Arthur Garfield Hays, a secular Jew, who were both from New York; they were joined by the local Tennes- see lawyer John Randolph Neal, the son of a colonel in the Confederate army.
But to William Jennings Bryan, a figure as recognizable as Darrow, and as irrepressible, the issue was faith. The issue was God. A three-time presidential nominee and crusading leader of the Democratic Party, Bryan arrived in Dayton intending to save men and women—and children, most especially—from the warped ideas that would turn them into atheists. Though he knew little about science and even less about evolution, Bryan intuited with stunning accuracy the frustration and anger and anxiety of the people he represented and claimed to speak for, particularly the religious Fundamentalists. Confident of his mission and sure of himself, he trusted that he could pluck out from the public schools, and even the public colleges, the science that so offended him and threatened them. This science had a name: “evolution.”
Excerpted from Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple. Copyright 2024, published by Random House.
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About Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple is the author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation.