Scopes: The Trial That Turned on a School Textbook

A Tennessee statute went after a theory. A teacher went on trial. But the thing that actually sat in the middle of the case was a school textbook, and almost nobody remembers that.

George William Hunter's A Civic Biology was the book Tennessee had approved for high school use. Six of its pages covered evolution. John Scopes assigned those pages, and the state of Tennessee charged him with a crime for it.

This article looks at that trial through the book, and at what the book itself said. The story is stranger and less tidy than the version usually told.

What the Law Actually Said

The law was the Butler Act. Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed it into law on March 21, 1925. The text is narrower than the law's reputation, which matters for understanding the case.

It made it unlawful to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible. In its place you were forbidden to teach that man had descended from a lower order of animals. That is the whole prohibition, and it targets human origins.

Nothing in it banned teaching evolution from fossils, from geology, or from comparative anatomy of other animals. Those were not illegal in Tennessee that year, and they were the larger part of what Hunter's book taught.

A crowd gathered outside the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, during the trial in July 1925. Brown Brothers, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Butler Act was not a southern outlier that sprang from nowhere. William Jennings Bryan had spent years campaigning against teaching evolution, and in 1918 he helped found the World's Christian Fundamentals Association.

The American Civil Liberties Union was organized in 1920 partly as a response to that body. When the Butler Act passed, the ACLU put a notice in Tennessee newspapers offering to pay the legal costs of anyone willing to test it.

Timing explains most of this. In 1900 only about one and a half percent of American teenagers attended a public high school. Twenty years later the number of students reading textbooks had grown twenty or thirty times over. Many of them went home with ideas their parents had never been raised on.

The Book That Made the Case

Several businessmen in Dayton read the ACLU notice and saw an opportunity. A trial would bring reporters and their money to a town whose population had fallen from about 3,000 in the 1890s to roughly 1,800 by 1925.

George Rappleyea, who managed a local coal company, argued the case at Fred Robinson's drugstore on May 5, 1925. John Scopes, then twenty-four and coaching football at the local high school, was called in and asked to stand trial.

John T. Scopes, the defendant, with his attorney John R. Neal during the 1925 trial. Bain News Service, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What Scopes had actually done was small. He was covering the biology timetable, and later said he could not recall whether he had taught evolution as a lesson at all.

The uncertainty mattered to nobody in the courtroom. What mattered was that the pages he assigned were the state's own. He held the book up in the drugstore and asked why it was illegal to teach from it.

The textbook is the reason the case is not quite what it sounds like. Scopes was prosecuted for using the book the state had prescribed. The statute and the textbook contradicted each other, and that contradiction is the trial.

What the book taught about evolution

On the science itself, Hunter was not writing fiction. The book explained that "evolution means change," that simple forms of life gave rise gradually to more complex ones, and that Darwin supplied the mechanism. Six pages carried that material.

The book gave no basis for understanding natural selection. It also took no side in the argument about where variation came from. It was a textbook of its moment, not a modern one.

What Else Was in the Book

Here the story stops being comfortable, and it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving out.

Hunter gave human evolution its own single page. On it he wrote of "races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants."

Man, he added, had once been "little better than one of the lower animals." That is the whole of what Hunter offered for the origin of human beings.

He then set out five "races or varieties of men" and named four as lower types. The Caucasian went last, as "the highest type of all." That is what is printed on page 196 of the book.

Hunter was also an enthusiastic eugenist, which in 1925 was a respectable academic position held at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and Brown. He defined eugenics as "the science of improving the human race through better heredity" and argued for separating the sexes among people he described as "defective."

Bryan read that material into the record in his closing argument, and quoted Darwin's own words on the weak being eliminated in uncivilized society. He called it proof that evolution dragged mankind down to the level of the brute.

So the most famous courtroom defeat of fundamentalism rested on a textbook with a chapter on sterilizing people the author thought inferior. That does not make Scopes wrong. It makes the story worth reading instead of retelling.

The seven scientists brought to Dayton to testify for the defense, outside the rented house they shared. Not one of them spoke to the jury. Watson Davis, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Eight Days in Dayton

The trial ran from July 10 to July 21, 1925, before Judge John T. Raulston. About a thousand people packed the courthouse on the first day, three hundred of them standing.

Roughly two hundred reporters came, and radio came with them. WGN in Chicago had been on the air for about a year. It spent $1,000 a day and rented an AT&T cable from Chicago to Dayton.

Four microphones went into the courtroom, and WGN rearranged the room so the microphones would work. Announcer Quinn Ryan narrated. It was the first live broadcast of any trial in American history.

The science never reached the jury

The defense called Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from Johns Hopkins, to explain the science. Raulston let him begin, then ruled the whole of the defense's expert testimony inadmissible.

The jury was told nothing about the biology. The defense read prepared statements from eight scientists into the record instead, for the benefit of an appellate court.

Scopes himself never took the stand. The person on trial in the only trial ever held under the Butler Act did not testify in it.

The science news service did its best to make up for that. Watson Davis, managing editor of Science Service, telegraphed a list of scientists to Darrow's team from the train, then sent the invitations himself. He drafted their prepared statements once the trial was under way.

Davis and a colleague gave up their hotel rooms to stay with the witnesses at the rented house the press called the Defense Mansion. The New York Times sent Science Service a letter of thanks for the coverage.

That matters. The science which did reach the country came through reporters rather than through the court, because no expert witness was allowed to speak to the jury.

Bryan on the stand

On July 20 the defense called William Jennings Bryan as an expert on the Bible. The court moved outside under the trees, where a sign on the courthouse wall read "Read Your Bible."

Darrow's questions were designed to show that Bryan could not read the Bible literally. Asked whether the six days of creation were twenty-four hours each, Bryan answered: "My impression is that they were periods."

The next day Raulston struck Bryan's testimony from the record. Darrow then asked the jury to convict Scopes deliberately, so that the case could be appealed, which cost Bryan the closing argument he had spent weeks writing.

William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, at the trial he came to Dayton to argue. United News Pictures, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What Happened Next

The jury deliberated for nine minutes and found Scopes guilty. Raulston fined him $100. It was the only prosecution ever brought under the Butler Act.

In January 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction on a technicality: the fine had been set by the judge rather than by the jury. The Butler Act itself stayed on the books.

Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton on July 26, 1925, five days after the verdict. He had been ill with diabetes for some time. The story that Darrow killed him with his cross-examination has been told for a century and is not what the record shows.

Scopes gave up teaching, took a master's degree at the University of Chicago and then worked as a petroleum engineer in Venezuela, where his notoriety would not follow him.

The statute itself did not last. Tennessee repealed the Butler Act in May 1967. Six months later the Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law of the same kind in Epperson v. Arkansas.

The book kept going

The textbook is the last chapter of this story, and it is the one most often skipped. In 1926 Hunter substantially revised the book.

The entire six-page section on evolution was cut from the special edition made for school boards in the southern states. Only a vague reference to Darwin's "interpretation of the way in which all life changes" survived. The word evolution did not appear in the text or the index of the edition called New Civic Biology.

Textbook publishers across the country did the same thing on their own, dropping the subject from their books for the next three or four decades. No court ordered it. The law did not need to.

How the memory was rewritten

Bryan College opened in Dayton in 1930, in the old high school where Scopes had taught. It was named for the prosecutor who lost the public argument, and it still is.

The play Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, opened on Broadway in 1955 and used the trial to stand against McCarthyism rather than against the Butler Act. The 1960 film with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March reshaped the case into a contest between two dignified men.

What came out of that version is a courtroom story about reason against authority. The textbook goes missing, along with the scientific racism in it, the excluded experts, and the fact that both sides came out claiming victory while the law stood. Dayton itself now runs an annual festival that plays up the publicity stunt, which is closer to the truth.

The marker outside the Rhea County Courthouse, where Scopes was charged with a crime for assigning six pages of a state-approved textbook. Bneu2013, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, where eight days of testimony in July 1925 made the Butler Act famous. Smithsonian Institution, no known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Key Terms in Plain English

These are the words in this article that would send you to a dictionary. Each one is given here the way it is actually used above.

Term	What it means here
Butler Act	The 1925 Tennessee law that made teaching human origins a misdemeanor.
Eugenics	The now-discredited movement for improving humanity by selective breeding.
Fundamentalism	Reading the Bible as literally accurate, including its account of creation.
Misdemeanor	A criminal charge lighter than a felony, punishable by a fine.
Natural selection	Darwin's mechanism: better-adapted people leave more offspring.
Indictment	A formal charge that sends a person to trial.
ACLU	The American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 to defend individual rights.
WCFA	The World's Christian Fundamentals Association, founded in 1918.
Appeal	Asking a higher court to review what a lower court decided.
Genetic	Relating to genes and inheritance.
Inadmissible	Ruled by the judge to be unusable as evidence.
Verdict	The jury's decision on guilt or innocence.

The words in this article that would otherwise send you to a dictionary.

Key Takeaways

• The Butler Act targeted human origins only, not evolution as a whole. Fossils, geology and animal anatomy stayed legal in Tennessee in 1925.
• Scopes was prosecuted for assigning pages from the textbook Tennessee had itself approved, which made the case a contradiction at its core.
• Hunter's book taught evolution, and it also ranked five "races of men" and praised eugenics. Bryan read that material into the record himself.
• The judge ruled the defense scientists inadmissible, so no biologist spoke to the jury. Scopes never testified either.
• Bryan died of diabetes five days after the verdict. The cross-examination theory is a century-old legend.
• The conviction fell on a technicality while the Butler Act stayed law, which Tennessee did not repeal until 1967.
• Publishers removed evolution from textbooks for 30 to 40 years without any court ordering them to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Scopes teach evolution?

The charge never rested on proving it. Prosecution called the assigned page the crime, and Scopes never disputed the reading. That is the whole point of the case: the statute turned a page assignment into a misdemeanor.

Why did the defense ask for a guilty verdict?

A guilty verdict could be appealed. An acquittal would have ended the matter, so Darrow asked the jury to convict deliberately so the case could reach a higher court.

Was the Butler Act really about banning evolution?

No. Its text covered teaching that man descended from a lower order of animals in place of divine creation. Evolution from other lines of evidence was not what it prohibited.

Did Clarence Darrow kill William Jennings Bryan?

There is no evidence for it. Bryan died on July 26, 1925, five days after the verdict, and had been ill with diabetes for some time.

Did the trial make teaching evolution legal?

No. Tennessee Supreme Court judges set the fine rather than the jury, so the conviction fell in 1927 and the law remained. Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 was the ruling that struck down these laws.

Was "Monkey Trial" its original name?

No. H. L. Mencken coined it while covering the trial for the Baltimore Sun, and it stuck.

Key references
• PBS: Monkey Trial timeline
• PBS: the WGN broadcast
• HISTORY.com: the trial
• Smithsonian Magazine
• Linder, UMKC: the trial
• Linder, UMKC: eugenics
• Linda Hall Library

Images: Wikimedia Commons, with the author and license named in each caption. Figures and dates follow the seven sources above.