Media Circus and a Rearguard Battle

Collage of the celebrated Scopes Trial of 1925, showing above (centre) defence attorney Clarence Darrow and prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, flanked by two cartoons, and below a scene from the seventh day of proceedings when the hearing was moved outside the courthouse due to the heat. Collage: Moebius.

The American courtroom battle between the word of God and that of Darwin spiralled in 1925 into an unprecedented media circus with a most unexpected outcome. Bionieuws looks back a century and searches for lessons for the future.   A sleepy town in the American South, a populist and devoutly religious politician, a celebrated criminal defence lawyer, mounting summer heat, and the rise of live radio broadcasting combined in the summer of 1925 to produce an explosive mixture. In the town of Dayton, Tennessee, hundreds of journalists and thousands of onlookers crowded around the striking Rhea County Courthouse from 10 to 21 July for the trial in which 24-year-old secondary school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. The case is formally known as The State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes, but has become best known as the Scopes Trial or Monkey Trial.  

For a week it generated front-page headlines across America and far beyond, with live coverage on multiple radio stations. The short version is that Scopes is found guilty and fined 100 dollars, prompting many Christian fundamentalists to crow victory. Yet many evolutionists also believe they have won, since the entire world has been able to witness what they see as foolish dogmatism.  

‘In reality, no one can truly claim victory. Over the years you see all manner of contradictory claims from both sides, which are characteristic of American polarisation over questions of faith and science. Looking back, what you can say above all is that an enormous media circus took place, one that ultimately did considerable damage to both parties. It was essentially a rearguard battle’, observes biologist and historian of science Bert Theunissen, emeritus professor of the history of the natural sciences and former director of the Descartes Centre at Utrecht University.  

  ‘It did produce a wealth of wonderful stories and is still regarded as one of the greatest courtroom cases in which a scientific question takes centre stage. The feature films about the Scopes Trial that appeared much later are largely based on fiction and have unjustly coloured and framed history as a battle between scientific truth and ignorant dogmatism.’  

Theunissen is referring, among other things, to the filmed stage play Inherit the Wind, which was released as a cinema film in 1960 with Spencer Tracy in the star role of a defence lawyer championing science and reason. The film received a remake in 1988, and more than fifty books have been written about the Scopes Trial, five of them published this year alone. Complete transcripts of this ‘trial of the century’ can be found online, though a fair amount of misinformation and half-truths also circulates.

  Resistance to evolution was widespread in the early twentieth century in a deeply religious country like the United States. Yet it is more or less by chance that the issue spiralled so badly out of control in Tennessee. The maize and tobacco farmer John Butler, who raised his children as God-fearing Baptists, was incensed that evolution was being taught in state secondary schools. ‘It robs the Christian of his hope and undermines the foundation of our government’, Butler declared. As a Democratic member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, he drafted a law prohibiting all universities and schools from teaching the theory of evolution and ‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and instead teaches that man descended from a lower order of animals’.  

This bill, the Butler Act, is passed in April 1925 by an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives (71 votes to 5) and the Senate (24 votes to 6) of Tennessee. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sees this as a threat to scientific research and academic freedom and wishes to have the law tested against the United States Constitution. Remarkably, in consultation with religious fundamentalists – who hope to put the small town of Dayton on the national map – they ‘arrange’ a court case around a teacher who has broken the law.  

  They find the 24-year-old John Scopes – a popular sports coach and supply teacher at the local Rhea County High School – willing to serve as a guinea pig. Standing in for the regular biology teacher, Scopes had assigned his biology class several chapters on evolution from the textbook A Civic Biology (see box: ‘Evolution became development’). He is charged on 5 May, but rather than a swift trial, swift conviction, and subsequent constitutional review, the case escalates almost immediately into a matter of national importance.  

The populist three-time Democratic presidential candidate and lawyer William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) steps forward as prosecutor, whereupon the celebrated defence attorney Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) offers his services to the ACLU. With these two well-known orators, fireworks seem guaranteed, and – partly owing to the rise of radio – a true media spectacle unfolds in Dayton in July 1925.  

Darrow sets the tone on the second day of proceedings with his observation that the law conflicts with the Constitution, and that the floodgates are now open: ‘Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books and the newspapers. After a while, Your Honour, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backwards to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.’  

‘Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are feeding and gloating for more’

 

On the third day he objects (unsuccessfully) to the judge’s practice of opening each session with a prayer, and on the seventh day he requests (successfully) that a banner reading ‘Read Your Bible’ be removed from the courtroom. The judge refuses – legally correctly – to allow the expert witnesses called by Darrow to testify, but does permit him to examine Bryan as an expert witness. This examination is the most iconic part of the trial, not least because the session takes place outdoors owing to the warm weather and the enormous public interest.  

  That exchange centres chiefly on biblical matters: was the Earth truly created in six days, did Eve as the first woman emerge from Adam’s rib, and did Jonah really spend three days inside a great fish? Questions to which Bryan consistently gives a scripturally faithful answer: ‘I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there.’ The outcome of the trial is predictable: even Darrow pleads for a verdict of ‘guilty’, so that they can ‘carry the case to the higher court to determine whether the law is good’. The jury, composed entirely of white men, duly returns this verdict within nine minutes. The judge then imposes a fine of $100.  

A painful blunder, as under Tennessee law only a jury may impose a fine of more than $50. The verdict is therefore unlawful, and the ACLU is consequently unable to bring it before a constitutional review. This is only discovered later, and Bryan never learns of it. He dies five days after the verdict from a stroke and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, with the inscriptions on his gravestone reading: ‘Statesman, yet friend to truth!’ and ‘He kept the faith’.  

‘As a PR campaign, the Scopes trial can be seen as a victory for our side. But the legal consequences could hardly have been more disastrous’, wrote the eminent palaeobiologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould in 1999 in God and Darwin. The Butler Act simply remained in force, though it was never actively enforced again. ‘But it remained an ever-present weapon against proper biology education. Publishers of textbooks, the most cowardly branch of the publishing world, generally caved and either left out evolution altogether or buried the subject in a small chapter at the back of the book’, Gould observed. It was not until 1968 that the courageous biology teacher Susan Epperson from Little Rock, Arkansas, succeeded in having a comparable anti-evolution law declared unconstitutional, which also spelled the end of the Butler Act in Tennessee.  

Later, too, there were high-profile court cases in the United States concerning the teaching of evolution: in the late 1970s, both Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws requiring schools to devote equal time to the teaching of evolution and creationism. In that Edwards v. Aguillard case, in which biology teacher Don Aguillard from Louisiana received the support of 72 Nobel laureates, the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that such laws were in conflict with the First Amendment to the Constitution (freedom of religion and expression). And in 2005, a court in Pennsylvania – in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case – ruled that intelligent design is not science and may therefore not be taught as an alternative to evolution.

Historian of science Bert Theunissen points out that these later cases have an entirely different context from the Scopes Trial. ‘Bryan was a populist and strictly religious, but a social reformer. He objected above all to social Darwinism and the implication that evolution automatically means the survival of the fittest’, said Theunissen. ‘The later disputes involve a small and fanatical group attempting to position creationism as science.’  

In the Netherlands and Europe, the debate between faith and science has never been pushed to such extremes as in the United States, Theunissen observes (see box: ‘Biblical literalism in the Netherlands’). ‘We must also be wary of the claim that science has a monopoly on the truth. A scientist is engaged in the pursuit of truth, and insights into evolution are constantly subject to change. We can certainly learn something from the Scopes Trial, but as a historian I am cautious about drawing general lessons. Knowledge of the past is all we have to shape the future, but we must always remain aware that contexts and circumstances change’, said Theunissen.  

The fact that the word ‘evolution’ does not appear in the executive orders that President Trump is currently issuing does not reassure him. Theunissen: ‘He is focusing mainly on everything to do with diversity, climate and gender at the moment. But if Trump has an interest in appeasing fundamentalist creationists, you never quite know where it will end up. It is important to remain vigilant.’  

A popular photograph and cartoon that appeared in magazines in 1925 in response to the Scopes Monkey Trial: the little monkey Jock listens to the verdict on 21 July (above) and a depiction of a lecture at the biblically faithful ‘Bryan University of Tennessee’ (below).  

 

Boxes:

At the time of the Scopes Trial, the textbook A Civic Biology by the American biology teacher George William Hunter (1863–1948) was the standard biology textbook. It was not discussed explicitly during the trial, but played a significant role in the background. Understandably so, for the book not only explains the theory of evolution but calls it a ‘doctrine’, identifies the (white) Caucasian race as ‘the highest type’, and openly and on false grounds advocates eugenics: ‘Tuberculosis, syphilis, (…), epilepsy and feeblemindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity.’ ‘Degenerate families’ are described as ‘true parasites’. ‘If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading’, with the caveat ‘humanity will not allow this’. The editions published after the Scopes Trial were – fortunately, on these points too – thoroughly revised. But in them ‘the evolution of man’ was also changed to ‘the development of man’, the diagram showing fossil ancestors of the horse was removed, and many references to evolutionary concepts were deleted. The book still contains a short biography of Darwin, but the word ‘evolution’ is no longer used.

In the Netherlands, resistance to the theory of evolution certainly existed from both Protestant and Roman Catholic quarters, but after the 1950s the debate between creation and evolution flared up only sporadically. When it did, it came mainly from the Reformed (Liberated) and evangelical communities, visible in, among other things, the book De evolutieleer, een theorie op haar retour (1969), the founding of the Evangelical Broadcasting Organisation (EO, 1969) and the Evangelical University of Applied Sciences (1974), and the television series Adam of aap (1977). From 1995 onwards, evolution was firmly embedded in secondary school examinations, and only a few ripples arose around intelligent design (2005) and the EO’s censorship of commentary on BBC nature documentaries (2007). Opposition to evolution now came almost exclusively from curious fringe groups such as creatie.info (brochure Evolutie of schepping in Darwin Year 2009) and the Stichting De Oude Wereld (Evolutie – het nieuwe studieboek, 2010). Creationism in the Netherlands has not died out entirely and is now concentrated in the Logos Instituut, with a website, newsletter, and the glossy magazine Bijbelvast, sent out free of charge every four months. In its pages one can read that dinosaurs and humans lived together briefly and in harmony, that the Flood sorted fossils into different geological strata, and that ‘the Lord God made man male and female: not all the same, therefore, and not something in between either’.

PHOTOS: WILLIAM SILVERMAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, BROWN BROTHERS, STERLING, PA, WATSON DAVIS, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, IMAGESELECT, ILLUSTRATION: ROLLIN KIRBY, 1925   See also: –The Surprising Effects of the Scopes Trial—100 Years Later – Answers in Genesis, 21 July 2025 –Scopes Trial Centennial Conference (Center for Inquiry, with Richard Dawkins) – The Chattanoogan Hotel, Chattanooga, Tennessee (USA), 18–20 July 2025 –Tired of put-downs, Tennessee town corrects the record with play about the Scopes trial it hosted – AP News, 18 July 2025 –Evolving Conflict: Scopes at 100-symposium – Scopes Courtroom, Dayton, Tennessee (USA), 16–17 July 2025 –Why many Americans still think Darwin was wrong, yet the British don’t – The Conversation, 15 July 2025 –Scopes Trial Centennial-festival – Dayton, Tennessee (USA), 11–19 July 2025-The Scopes Monkey Trial at 100: Why People Don’t Accept the Theory of Evolution – Skeptic, 12 July 2025 –100 years after the Scopes trial, Americans are still divided over what kids should learn – USA Today News, 11 July 2025 –‘What should be taught in schools?’: the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial’ turns 100 – The Guardian, 10 July 2025 –How Theater Helps Us Remember the Scopes Monkey Trial 100 Years Later – Time, 10 July 2025 –Of Monkeys and Men — 100 Years since the Scopes Trial and Still Missing the Bigger Picture on Science v. Religion – Religion Dispatches, 10 July 2025 –Scopes Revisited: An Interview with Historian Jefrey Breshears – Evolution News (NB: associated with the pro-ID Discovery Institute, GvM), 7 July 2025 –The Scopes Monkey Trial and the evolution of fundamentalism – The Christian Century, 7 July 2025 –Scopes Trial Play Draws Crowds – WDEF website, 7 July 2025 –100 years after Scopes trial, cultural discourse about ‘Bible Belt’ Christians still suffers – opinion piece by Amanda Held Opelt, Religion News Service website, 3 July 2025 –A century after the Scopes monkey trial, 1 in 4 Americans reject evolution – Washington Times, 1 July 2025 –1 in 4 Americans reject evolution, a century after the Scopes monkey trial spotlighted the clash between science and religion – The Conversation, 1 July 2025 –A Century Later, the Spirit of Scopes Is Alive and Well – Evolution News (NB: associated with the pro-ID Discovery Institute, GvM), 1 July 2025 –The Scopes Monkey Trial: A Battle of Worldviews – Institute for Creation Research website, 30 June 2025 (Note: contains some nonsense, GvM) –What was the Scopes Trial? – How one teacher’s arrest sparked a national debate – National Geographic, 23 June 2025 –100 years after the Scopes trial, science is still under attack – Science News, 16 June 2025 –A Century Ago, a High School Teacher From a Small Tennessee Town Ignited a National Debate Over Human Evolution – Smithsonian magazine, 21 May 2025 –Looking Back with Epperson, Fifty Years Later – NCSE website, 5 November 2018