State Bans Evolution to Protect Children; Treats Children to Front-Row Seat at Circus Instead

There was no crisis in the biology classrooms of Tennessee, which is generally the surest sign one is about to be legislated into existence. The schools taught from the common textbooks, evolution included, and the Republic had somehow endured.¹

In March 1925 the General Assembly passed the Butler Act, making it a misdemeanor for any public-school teacher 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 had descended from a lower order of animals. The governor signed it expecting, he said, that it would never actually be enforced — an expectation that badly underrated the entertainment value of his own statute.¹

The American Civil Liberties Union promptly advertised for a teacher willing to be prosecuted as a test case. The boosters of Dayton, smelling a chance to put their town on the map, recruited a young substitute named John T. Scopes, who allowed that he had probably taught evolution and submitted to arrest. What was conceived as a tidy constitutional test became, the instant the press detrained, a carnival — hot-dog stands, chimpanzees, and revival tents on the courthouse lawn.²

The principals were giants. William Jennings Bryan, three-time candidate for President and tribune of fundamentalism, joined the prosecution; Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the land, took the other chair. Hundreds of reporters descended, the proceedings went out over the first live national radio hookup of a trial, and Darrow put Bryan himself on the stand to defend the literal truth of Scripture.³

Scopes was duly convicted and fined one hundred dollars, a verdict later set aside on a technicality. Tennessee had successfully defended its law and, in the same motion, exhibited itself to a watching planet as precisely the place the law implied it was. The statute stayed on the books until 1967; the ridicule arrived at once and never quite left. The fix had shielded the children from a theory by treating them to a spectacle.¹

Scopes isn't on trial; civilization is on trial.— Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925