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The Butler Law
The spectacle that would become the Scopes trial started with the 1921 election of wealthy farmer John Washington Butler to the Tennessee state legislature. Butler’s campaign had promised “to remove books that taught the theory of evolution from the classroom.”[1] In 1925, Butler would make good on that promise. House Bill No, 185, which was authored by Butler, prohibited “the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the States,” and carried with it the penalty of a $100 to $500 fine.[2] The bill was quickly passed by the Tennessee House of Representatives by a vote of 75-5 and was sent to the Tennessee Senate. State Senator John A. Shelton, who had been unsuccessful in authoring similar anti-evolution bills contacted his friend William Jennings Bryan to get his opinion. Bryan was a firm believer in the separation of Church and State, but was incensed when he received letters “from parents all over the country that state schools were being used to undermine the religious faith of their children.”[3] As such he strongly supported the idea of the anti-evolution bill. He did however, caution his friend that the penalty imposed by the bill “could be used by opponents to divert attention from the law,” something he had seen happen to a similar bill in Kentucky.[4] Despite Bryan’s warnings, the Tennessee Senate passed the bill, fine included, with a vote of 24-6. On March 21, 1945, Butler’s bill was signed into law by Tennessee Governor Peay.
Soon after signing the enactment of the Butler Law, Governor Peay addressed the state legislature. In this address Peay made the following statement:
After a careful examination I can find noting of consequence in the books now being taught in our schools with which this bill will interfere in the slightest manner. Therefore it will not put our teachers in any jeopardy. Probably the law will never be applied. It may not be sufficiently definite to admit of any specific application or enforcement. Nobody believes that it is going to be an active statue.[5]
It is unknown as to whether Peay did not examine Tennessee’s public school science textbooks as closely as he claimed, or if he falsely assumed that teachers employed by Tennessee’s public school system would willing comply with the new law. What is certain, however, is that in only two months time the validity of the Butler Act would be challenged in the court system and in the national arena. In 1925 the science textbook of choice in Tennessee public schools was the 1914 edition of George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology. Had Governor Peay taken a closer look at Hunter’s text, he would have realized that it devotes an entire chapter to the ideas of evolution and explains Darwin’s theory of evolution as “the belief that simple forms of life on the earth slowly and gradually gave rise to those more complex and that thus ultimately the most complex forms came into existence.”[6] It was this very lesson that would be taught by John T. Scopes, that would be the test case for the Butler Act, and that would bring national attention to small town of Dayton, Tennessee and the majority rule vs. minority rights debate.
[1] Steven P.Olson, The Trial of John T. Scopes: A Primary Source Account (New York, NY: Rosen Publishing Group, 2004), 8.
[3] William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird Bryan. The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Philadelphia, PA: The United Publishers of America, 1925), 459.
[4] Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan
(New York, NY: G.P. Putnam's Son, 1971) 633.
[5] Steven P.Olson, The Trial of John T. Scopes: A Primary Source Account
(New York, NY: Rosen Publishing Group, 2004), 10.
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