One-hundred years ago, Tennessee passed the Butler Law that prohibited 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 is descended from a lower order of animals.” The statute had two parts joined by “and” thus also requiring that the teacher say the Bible was wrong. the Governor signed the law March 21, 1925. Additional bills were introduced to amend the laws of gravity (that would make us all weigh less) and do something about the excessive speed of light.
The county school superintendent admitted the book was sanctioned by the state, required to be used, and had been taught since 1909. The owner of the drug store in town admitted he sold the book that he bought from the state board of education. So it was not illegal to buy or sell the textbook designated by the state, just a crime to teach from it as required.
The ACLU had put an ad in the paper to find a person willing to challenge the law. The local businessmen cooked up the idea of an arrest and trial to boost tourism to Dayton which was a dying town. They enlisted John Scopes, the 24-year-old biology teacher to agree to be arrested and promised him he would not lose his teaching job. He was released on a $1,000 bond.
The prosecution enlisted Sue Hicks and his brother Herbert as there weren’t public prosecutors like there are now. Sue Hicks was the person who inspired Shel Silverstein’s poem “A Boy Named Sue” that later became a hit for Johnny Cash. The prosecution argued it was a simple statutory violation.
A fundamentalist minister wired William Jennings Bryan, three-time defeated presidential candidate, and asked him to help prosecute the case. He accepted because this was another chance for a moment in the limelight. He claimed it was about god and states’ rights.
When Darrow found out Bryan, his former friend, had agreed, he decided he had to offer to help the defense. To Darrow it was about the right to think, to speak, and to worship. Belief in god was not the issue. Being forced to accept the interpretation of god from one religion was.
The ACLU posed it as a test of free speech, religious freedom, and academic freedom and vowed to take it to the Supreme Court. They did not want Darrow at the trial or on the appeal, but since Scopes wanted him, he stayed. All assumed Scopes would be convicted and then the case would be appealed to the state Supreme Court and then U.S. Supreme Court.
At one point, Bryan said, “I believe religion is greater than education.” That attitude resounded today in the Arizona House when during an argument on SB1269 to allow chaplains into our schools, Representative David Marshall said he believed Jesus is a better counselor for the students than a psychologist.
Bryan claimed the educated elite were trying to force their views on the people through public schools. That sounds very much like those crying about “woke ideology” today. He also spoke about the white race killing itself off in wars that would leave the earth to the darker, and inferior, races. The NAACP pointed out that if a person believed in evolution, they would have to admit that there is no difference between the “white” race and the race they so like to despise. The legal argument of “states’ rights” has often been used to justify discrimination.
Darrow tried to call a variety of experts. Twelve experts had volunteered to testify. Eight were scientists and four were theologians. Professor Metcalf had been allowed to discuss science in the absence of the jury, and then the judge ruled that he would allow no scientific testimony. For the record on appeal, the judge agreed to have summaries of the affidavits written by the scientists read into the record without the jury present. That took three days. But with no scientific evidence, everyone knew the trial was essentially over. Some reporters left.
On the vagueness argument, Darrow argued which Bible? Which interpretation? At the time of the trial there were 500 warring sects arguing how to interpret the bible. Today there are 2,500. So this was about power not the bible at all. Setting creed against creed only results in violence as history has shown us time after time.
Darrow also argued the second half of the statute i.e. that Scopes had to say the Bible was wrong which he never did. The judge ruled that the second part was just to explain the first part and overruled Darrow’s objection.
It was June by then and the trial was moved outside because the crowds were so great that the floor was sagging on the third floor and it was unbearably hot in the packed courtroom. A stage already existed for religious services given on the courthouse lawn.
Since the Biblical scholars could not be called as witnesses, the idea occurred to Darrow to call Bryan who claimed to be an expert on the bible. This led to the real drama in the case. The prosecution realized this was not going to go well and tried to stop it by arguing no “experts” could be called including Bryan. But Bryan wanted to talk, and the judge overruled them.
On the stand, Darrow peppered Bryan with questions about his literal belief in the bible. Bryan admitted that the earth goes around the sun so he couldn’t explain how the earth could have stopped to make a longer day. Bryan admitted that maybe fish were not on the Ark and that since every civilization had been wiped out by the flood he could not explain how there was proof of older civilizations. He also admitted that the six “days” it took to make the earth might not mean 24-hour days but could mean millions of years. Darrow asked Bryan if Eve was the only woman where did Cain’s wife come from? Darrow asked how there could have been morning and evening in the days one, two, and three when there was no sun until the fourth day? He asked if the snake was punished for giving Eve the fruit by being forced forevermore to slither on its belly, how had it gotten around before?
Bryan had no answers and simply said, “I don’t’ think about things I don’t think about.”
Darrow then asked, “Do you think about things you do think about?” which got a big laugh. The judge expunged all of Bryan’s testimony from the record
The papers detailed Bryan’s ignorance of the Bible and that he didn’t want to know about anything that disagreed with his opinion. He was described as “near hysterics” and “intellectually butchered.” He didn’t know what evolution meant just like today they don’t know what “woke” or DEIA means.
Scopes was found guilty in nine minutes and fined $100. Bond was set at $500. The defense had 30 days to prepare the appeal for state Supreme Court.
Two weeks after the end of the trial, the KKK held their first national march in Washington, D.C. on August 8, 1925 with between 25,000-50,000 people in white hoods.
After the trial, Bryan never left Dayton. He was not in good health and died at his lodging on July 26 at age 65. Arizona was one of three states along with Oklahoma and Arkansas where schools were closed at the hour of burial.
In January 1926, the Defense filed a 100-page brief at the Tennessee Supreme Court focusing on the exclusion of scientific evidence and vagueness. In May 1926, the prosecution filed a 400-page response claiming evolution was “pseudo-science,” that no credible scientists testified, religion is the safeguard of constitutional government, and the defense attorneys were communists.
On May 31, the court heard two days of oral argument. They declared the law constitutional, but they reversed the fine because any fine over $50 had to be set by a jury so the case was nolle prosequi (not prosecuted) and there could be no appeal. This prohibited Darrow and the ACLU from taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Darrow’s arguments to the judge ring true today:
They passed a law making the Bible the yardstick to measure every man’s intellect, and to measure every man’s learning. Every bit of knowledge that the mind has, must now be submitted to a religious test … If men are not tolerant, if men cannot respect each other’s opinions, if men cannot live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. Your honor knows the fires that have been lighted in American to kindle religious bigotry and hate. If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school … tomorrow you may ban books and magazines and the newspapers. Ignorance and fanaticism is forever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.
And here we are, 100 years later with the same religious bigotry and hate being preached by what are today called Christian Nationalists.
And another Darrow argument:
There is not a single line of any constitution that can withstand bigotry and ignorance when it seeks to destroy the right of the individual; and bigotry and ignorance are ever active. Here, we find today as brazen and as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the Middle Ages, and the only difference is we have not provided that they shall be burned at the state. But there is time for that, your honor, we have to approach these things gradually.
And here we are today with book banning and firing of teachers who stand up for students to demand freedom to read and learn and think.
The entire framing of the case as the “monkey trial” was false much like Fox news today. No one argued or even suggested that man descended from monkeys. It was clickbait. The locals hired a monkey with clothes on to walk around town on a leash and sit and eat at a table to add to the farce.
Bryan made the same argument for book banning being made today i.e. that parents have the right to control what their kids are taught in the classroom. The fallacy of that was illustrated by a poll asking Americans if we should get rid of Arabic numbers in the curriculum. They said yes. We couldn’t even figure out how to change to the metric system used worldwide let alone go back to Roman Numerals! I’m sure many a parent has struggled with their child over math and science and even English homework. My great grandparents finished 3rd grade; my grandparents finished 8th grade; my mother finished high school; I and my siblings but one finished college. That is the progress of education.
Not until 1968 in the Epperson case, was a similar law in Arkansas stricken because it selects from the body of knowledge a particular segment which it proscribes for the sole reason that it is deemed to conflict with a particular religious doctrine; that is, with a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group.
The court said,
The antecedents of today’s decision are many and unmistakable. They are rooted in the foundation soil of our Nation. They are fundamental to freedom. Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.
Today Dayton has an annual Scopes Festival, adopts the moniker Monkey Town, and even has a brewery called that. In the courthouse a statute of Bryan stands across from Darrow. While 98% of the scientific community accepts evolution, in 2008 just a slight majority of high school biology teachers emphasized evolution and by 2019, that had gone up to 67%. So that same 33% of the population that are in the Cult still refuse to believe it. In 2014, even Pope Francis said evolution and the bible do not contradict which is one thing Darrow would have had the theologians testify 100 years earlier.
But as Darrow pointed out, fundamentalists have “laid siege to state legislatures and school boards” in the 1920s as they have today and now we argue over CRT and DEIA. We must be able to teach freely the history about our country. Our painful past must be confronted. That is how students learn.
Both the Butler Law in 1925 and Oklahoma’s anti CRT law today are imprecise, ambiguous, leave teachers unable to know what they can do, and leave teachers trapped in climate of persecution. Bills have been introduced to fine teachers, bring criminal charges, and take their teaching license which creates a chilling atmosphere so they are afraid to teach at all.
Should we eliminate any book that might offend anybody with any word in it? Are opposing viewpoints not allowed? (I personally have been kicked out of three groups for having an opposing viewpoint so it’s not just public school.) A bill in the AZ legislature this year would have prohibited a teacher from assigning a student to argue the opposite side of what they believed. That is a common teaching technique, and we learn a lot from doing that. When you learn the other sides argument, you can counter it, but the fear is that they might see some good in it. In AZ we have legislation mandating that we teach the Holocaust in another country but not the holocaust here with genocide, race riots against Blacks, and lynching. A bill was introduced to mandate teaching the heritage and contributions of Asian and Pacific Islanders, which is good, but at the same time we can’t teach that the Trail of Tears was an attack on Natives, that the Civil War was about slavery, that the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre happened, or that it took a hundred years to pass an anti-lynching law.
It doesn’t take long to figure out what is happening here. Racism requires censorship. White superiority requires that history be denied and manipulated. Patriarchy requires that women be erased. This is why we can’t have nice things.