Scopes Trial Didn’t Settle Debate Over Evolution

It had all the elements of the modern American show trial. Born of a small-town booster’s impulse, celebrity lawyers were enticed to square off in a Tennessee courtroom to resolve a basic conflict between science and religion.

But in the end, the Scopes Monkey Trial, as it is known to history, resolved little, as events this year attest. The basic issue of the case--evolution versus creationism in the schools--has been cropping up with increasing frequency, as in August, some 75 years after Scopes, when the Kansas Board of Education stripped evolution as a requirement in the standard high school science curriculum.

In 1982, a federal judge in Arkansas struck down a state requirement that “creation science” be taught alongside evolution, ruling that it violated the constitutional ban on establishing a state religion and that, lacking a secular educational purpose, it existed only to promote religion.

The new maneuver in Kansas essentially argues that evolution, as unproven theory, doesn’t warrant inclusion in required course work.

The Kansas decision did not receive the kind of attention that accompanied the charges against John T. Scopes in 1925. The arrest itself was the predictable response to a deliberate act of provocation by the evolutionists.

At the time, the case dominated the headlines, a celebrity trial set against the real agonies of the day.

World War I was still a fresh memory and fascism was rising in Europe. The second volume of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was published that year. In the United States, Ku Klux Klan-backed candidates were winning elections on anti-immigrant and Prohibition-linked law and order platforms, and Al Capone was just taking over the Chicago rackets.

Against that backdrop, religious conservatives in Tennessee persuaded the state Legislature to pass the Butler Law, banning the teaching in public schools of any scientific theory that denied the literalness of the biblical version of creation.

The law was part of a tide of legislation sweeping the South that prohibited the teaching of evolution, which creationists saw as a direct scientific challenge to Genesis. Such laws were red capes for the bulls of science enthused by Albert Einstein’s still-fresh theories of relativity.

And the laws quickly caught the attention of the 5-year-old American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU went trolling for a defendant, issuing a press release offering to defend anyone who flouted the law.

A man whose name is largely lost to history--George Rappelyea--spotted a news item about the ACLU’s offer in the local Dayton, Tenn., newspaper. A believer in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and a booster of Dayton, he quickly realized that the spotlight would shine on both the law and the city if a local teacher were to get arrested for teaching Darwin.

He enlisted his friend Scopes, a science teacher and football coach, as the lawbreaker, and wired the ACLU that it had a client.

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Initially, Rappelyea and local boosters wanted H.G. Wells, author of “The Time Machine” and other contemporary science fiction novels, to defend Scopes. They wound up with Clarence Darrow, who a year earlier had introduced into the American legal system the concept of psychiatric evidence.

The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential contender in the twilight of his career, but still an ardent proponent of fundamentalist Christianity.

The trial lasted 12 days and was accompanied by what is now a familiar hoopla: protesters in the streets, vendors under tents and a throng of media--including H.L. Mencken--to decipher it all for the masses.

The trial’s most scintillating moments came when Darrow, forbidden by the creationism-sympathetic judge from putting on scientists as witnesses, summoned Bryan to the stand. It was a battle of orators, and Darrow carried the day, his questioning leading Bryan to say that Creation was not completed in 24-hour days, but periods of time that “might have continued for millions of years.”

Darrow then asked for a directed verdict of guilty for his client--they had never denied he taught evolution and wanted to test the law at the higher courts. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, the minimum.

Scopes’ conviction was eventually overturned on a technicality, so the ACLU never got its test case. Although the Butler Law remained on the books, public sentiment turned and it became irrelevant and largely unenforced. However, its tenet of creationism versus evolution in the schools would rise again in following decades.

As for Scopes himself, he left teaching and became a chemical engineer in the oil industry. He died at age 70 in 1970 in Shreveport, La.