The Scopes Monkey Trial: Darwin in The Dock

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan chew the cud

It is an argument that won’t go away – Creationism or Evolution. On the 18 June, 1925, it was played out in a Courthouse in a small Tennessee town in a trial that transfixed a nation. It became a battle between traditionalism and modernism, religion and science, and the points at issue, the arguments fought, over were to go well beyond the details of the case.

Fundamentalist religious revivalism was in the ascendant in the United States following the conclusion of the First World War. By 1920 America was dry, following the passage through Congress the previous year of the 18th Amendment, or Prohibition Act, that outlawed the production, transportation, sale and consumption of alcohol. The moral cleansing of America however, would continue, and the next target of the fundamentalists was to be the eradication of the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from America’s schools. At the forefront of this campaign was the populist Presbyterian 3 times Democratic Presidential candidate (he lost on each occasion) William Jennings Bryan. He was a noted firebrand and a brilliant orator who had come to national attention following his famous Cross of Gold speech to the Democratic National Convention of 9 July, 1896, which he concluded with the words. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a Cross of Gold.” It was a sensation (and is recognised as one of the greatest speeches in American political history) and won him the nomination and at the age of just 36 he is the youngest ever Presidential candidate. Under his auspices the campaign to eradicate Charles Darwin from American schools became a Crusade. By 1925, he had succeeded in having it removed from the school curriculum of 15 States. In February, 1925, the State of Tennessee had passed a Bill (the Butler Act) making it illegal to, “teach any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation as taught in the Bible and teach instead that man was descended from a lower form of animal.” 

The Scopes Monkey Trial, as it was to become known, was unusual in that it was deliberately contrived. Some local businessmen in the Small Tennessee town of Dayton worried that their municipality was dying on its feet (its population had more than halved to 1500) decided to put the Butler Act to the test. They hoped that it would generate for the town some much needed publicity. It worked beyond their wildest dreams. A school teacher John T Scopes was persuaded to teach Darwin in his biology class. He was to be the guinea pig and he was consequently arrested for a breach of the Butler Act. The case immediately caught the public attention and a northern newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, posted bail and sent its leading reporter H L Mencken to cover the trial.