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The Scopes Trial
On May 4, 1925, less than two months after the Butler Law was enacted, the Chattanooga Daily News ran a press release which stated that the ACLU was “looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law [the Butler Act].”[1] When notable members of Dayton saw the ACLU’s press release, they began to make a plan to put their town on the map, and they used John Scopes to do it. Scopes was a young teacher, and when asked by such prominent members of the Dayton community as George Rappelyea, Walter White, Clay Green, and Doc Robinson to teach evolution in his classroom and take the ACLU up on its offer, he did not hesitate.
By the middle of June news of the impending trial of John T. Scopes had swept the nation and had captured the attention of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Bryan willingly accepted the prosecutions offer to take an active part in the trial and quickly became the prosecutions figure head. He believed that this would be the perfect opportunity to once and for all prove the legal right of the state to enact legislation backed by the majority that governed the way in which public funds were used, namely what was taught in the public school system. The ACLU on the other hand, planned to argue that the Butler Law violated the Tennessee Constitution’s establishment clause, which was modeled after the First Amendment, and which called for the separation of church and state.[2] When famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow heard about the case he immediately offered his services to Scopes, who accepted despite objections of the ACLU. The stage for the trial of the century had been set, and the actors were in place, all that was left was to see how things would play out.
When the trial first got underway it had attracted national attention, but there was no way of knowing the direction it would take. The defense argued that the Butler Law not only violated the Tennessee Constitution, but violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Darrow very movingly argued that if the state were allowed to outlaw the teaching of evolution in the public school system, that next they could outlaw it in private schools, and may even go so far as to “ban books and the newspapers.”[3] Bryan on the other hand argued that the Butler Law did not infringe upon the teachers’ “freedom of conscience or freedom of speech,” as “they are at liberty to think as they please and say what they like,” but they do not have the “right to demand pay for teaching that which parents and the taxpayer do not want taught.”[4] Unfortunately, while Bryan would continue to argue the case in terms of majority rule, Darrow would deviate from the ACLU’s plan for the trial and would turn it into a three ring circus centered on the validity of the literal interpretation of the Bible rather than the rights of people to dissent from majority-backed policies and programs.
[1] Steven P.Olson, The Trial of John T. Scopes: A Primary Source Account (New York, NY: Rosen Publishing Group, 2004), 10.
[2] Jeffrey Moran,. The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (New York, NY: St. Martins, 2002), 34.
[3] Arthur Weinberg, Attorney For the Damned (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 187.
[4] Edward J.Larson, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997), 45-46.
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