A Show Trial for Evolution: The Scopes Case

In 1922 Bryan learned that Kentucky’s Baptist State Board of Missions had passed a resolution calling for a state law against the teaching of evolution in public schools. He embraced the cause, traveling around the state to speak in its favor. When the ban came up for consideration at the Kentucky House of Representatives, it lost by a single vote. By then, Bryan and his fellow creationists had carried the crusade to other southern states, and in 1925 Tennessee was the first state to heed the call with legislation.

The American Civil Liberties Union was opposed to the law, on the grounds that it robbed schoolteachers of their freedom of speech. They set out to overthrow it by announcing they would defend any Tennessee teacher who would break it. Their plan was to attract a lot of attention to a trial they knew they’d lose and then appeal the decision on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. If they won the appeal on those grounds, the law itself would be wiped out.

In the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, a few town leaders heard of the ACLU’s offer. They had no particular feelings one way or the other about the law, but they all agreed that a show trial would be a good way to earn some publicity. They met at a local drugstore with a young teacher and football coach named John Scopes. Scopes, who normally taught physics, told them that as a substitute teacher he had taught chapters on human evolution from A Civic Biology. The town leaders asked him if he would stand in court for a test case, and after some thought, Scopes said he would be glad to. Once a warrant had been written out for his arrest, he left the drugstore to play some tennis.

The ACLU expected Scopes to be found guilty and promptly fined, whereupon they could get down to the real business of an appeal. But that wasn’t what happened. Bryan, who happened to be in Tennessee at the time, announced that he would come to Dayton to “assist” the prosecution, making an already prominent trial into a sensation. The ACLU then got an offer it couldn’t refuse, from the defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Darrow had just made national headlines in 1924 for his defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two university students who had killed a boy for sport. Darrow had convinced the judge that although they were guilty, they should not be executed. The murder was not for any cold‑blooded motive but simply the product of two “diseased brains.”

It was just this sort of materialistic view of human nature that Bryan despised. And the outspoken agnostic Darrow had no great love for Bryan either, considering him little more than a huckster. Darrow sent a telegram to the ACLU volunteering his services, sending a copy to the press as well. With reporters waiting to hear its response, the ACLU had no choice but to accept Darrow’s offer. And at that moment they lost all control of their cause.

With two such famous, fiery men opposed to each other, the trial drew national attention, and with radios in many American homes for the first time, it even drew a national audience. The Scopes Monkey Trial, as it came to be known, certainly proved to be high drama (a play, Inherit the Wind, was written about it and was later made into a movie). Darrow went so far as to call Bryan himself to the witness stand, where he grilled his opponent on the contradictions of creationism. Darrow forced Bryan to admit that he did not believe in a literal six days of creation, demonstrating that the Bible was open to many different interpretations–some of which might accommodate evolution. But the following day the judge threw out Bryan’s testimony. Darrow promptly demanded that Scopes be found guilty. He was already thinking about an appeal.

Darrow is usually remembered as the winner of the Scopes Monkey Trial, but the truth is that the teaching of evolution actually suffered from his grandstanding. The jury found Scopes guilty, and the judge fined him $100. Darrow appealed the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, and it was overturned a year later–but not on the constitutional grounds the ACLU had hoped for. The judge in the original case had set the fine for Scopes, but Tennessee law allowed only juries to set fines over $50. On this technicality, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case. “Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case,” the judges declared.

Darrow was apparently more interested in making great speeches than in paying close attention to his case; because he had failed to object to the judge’s fine in the original trial, the ACLU had lost its chance to challenge the ban on teaching evolution. In fact, Tennessee’s anti‑evolution law would stay on the books for more than 40 years. And by the end of the 1920s Bryan’s allies had passed similar laws in Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, and Oklahoma.

The Rise of “Creation Science”

In the 1940s and 1950s, the United States became a hotbed of research in evolutionary biology. It was home to leaders of the modern synthesis, such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and George Simpson; American paleontology, genetics, and zoology were becoming the envy of the world. But little of that new knowledge filtered out of museums and biology departments to the public at large, because creationists pressured textbook publishers to drop any mention of evolution. Afraid to lose business, publishers bowed to their demands.

The tide began to turn in the 1960s, in part because of the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. That triumph of Soviet science created a national panic over the state of American science education–including the teaching of evolution. Textbooks began surveying evolution again, and by 1967 even the Tennessee legislature had repealed the law that had gotten Scopes arrested.

Meanwhile, a young Arkansas biology teacher named Susan Epperson was playing the part of Scopes in a new court case. Epperson challenged Arkansas’s anti‑evolution law, arguing that it established religion in public schools. The Arkansas Supreme Court refused to hear the case, saying simply that the law was a valid exercise of a state’s rights. Finally the ACLU saw a chance to make the case that had eluded it 42 years before. They took Epperson’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, and the Court struck down the Arkansas law. Justice Abe Fortas wrote that the law was “an attempt to blot out a particular theory from public education” in order to advance a religious agenda.

Ironically, Fortas may have helped steer creationists toward a new strategy, one that they still use today. Rather than simply claim that Darwinism was immoral, a growing number of anti‑evolutionists instead claimed that creationism was actually a viable alternative scientific account of the rise of life. Anyone who would keep this “creation science” out of the classrooms, they claimed, was guilty of trying to blot out a particular theory from public education. Instead, the creationists demanded, public schools should offer both theories and let students decide for themselves.

The first manifesto of “creation science” appeared in 1961, a book called Genesis Flood, written by a hydraulic engineer named Henry Morris. Morris revived an old strain of creationism based on an extremely strict reading of the Bible. He argued that Earth was created in six literal days, that it was only a few thousand years old, and that all the geological formations and fossils on Earth had been set in their current place during Noah’s Flood. Morris claimed that all the new evidence of an ancient Earth, such as geological clocks based on radioactive decay, were flawed, tainted, or otherwise unreliable. And he offered what he claimed were scientific explanations for the events in the Bible. Adam really could have named all the animals in a single day, for example, because he was much more intelligent in his Edenic perfection than living humans. In 1972 Morris founded the Institute for Creation Research, which has published books, magazines, videos, and Web sites ever since.

Morris inspired other creationists to coat their own opposition to evolution in a scientific lacquer. Some, who go by the name Old‑Earth creationists, accept a 13‑billion‑year‑old universe and a 4.5‑billion‑year‑old Earth but claim that humans were created uniquely and only recently by God. Not surprisingly, each camp scorns the other. Old‑Earth creationists attack Flood Geology creationists for ignoring the facts of geology and astronomy. Flood Geology creationists accuse Old‑Earth creationists of abandoning the word of God and inching their way down the slippery slope toward Darwinism and atheism. Creationists may stand opposed to Darwin, but they certainly don’t stand together.