First, Tennessee mandated that George W. Yet Bryan volunteered to join the prosecution team because he opposed the theory of evolution for its association with eugenics and with social Darwinism. Darrow was a legendary lawyer. Labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and William D. Loeb known more commonly as Leopold and Loeb , and Henry Sweet, a Detroit African American accused of murder in a civil rights upheaval, numbered among his most well-known clients.
The trial began on July 10, The atmosphere was circus-like. More than six hundred spectators shoehorned themselves into the courtroom. The presiding judge, John T. The Butler Act set off alarm bells around the country. The ACLU responded immediately with an offer to defend any teacher prosecuted under the law. John Scopes, a young popular high school science teacher, agreed to stand as defendant in a test case to challenge the law.
He was arrested on May 7, , and charged with teaching the theory of evolution. They sought to demonstrate that the Tennessee law was unconstitutional because it made the Bible, a religious document, the standard of truth in a public institution.
The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, a former Secretary of State, presidential candidate, and the most famous fundamentalist Christian spokesperson in the country. His strategy was quite simple: to prove John Scopes guilty of violating Tennessee law.
Darrow speaking to jurors at the Scopes trial. Opening statements pictured the trial as a titanic struggle between good and evil or truth and ignorance. Bryan claimed that "if evolution wins, Christianity goes.
The prosecution opened its case by asking the court to take judicial notice of the Book of Genesis , as it appears in the King James version.
It did. Superintendent White led off the prosecution's list of witnesses with his testimony that John Scopes had admitted teaching about evolution from Hunter's Civic Biology. Chief Prosecutor Tom Stewart then asked seven students in Scope's class a series of questions about his teachings. They testified that Scopes told them that man and all other mammals had evolved from one-celled organism.
Darrow cross-examined--gently, though with obvious sarcasm--the students, asking freshman Howard Morgan: "Well, did he tell you anything else that was wicked? After drugstore owner Frank Robinson took the stand to testify as to Scope's statement that "any teacher in the state who was teaching Hunter's Biology was violating the law," the prosecution rested.
It was a simple case. Defense team strategizing during the Scopes trial. On Thursday, July 16, the defense called its first witness, Dr. Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from the Johns Hopkins University. The prosecution objected, arguing that the testimony was irrelevant to Scopes' guilt or innocence under the statute.
Before ruling the prosecution's evidence, Judge Raulston decided to hear some of Dr. Metcalf's testimony about the theory of evolution. The testimony evoked Bryan's only extended speech of the trial.
Bryan mocked Metcalf's exposition of the theory of evolution, complaining that the evolutionists had man descending "not even from American monkeys, but Old World monkeys. Anti-evolution lawmaker John Butler called it "the finest speech of the century. The next day, Raulston ruled the defense's expert testimony inadmissible.
The defense experts. Raulston's ruling angered Darrow. He said he could not understand why "every suggestion of the prosecution should meet with an endless waste of time, and a bare suggestion of anything that is perfectly competent on our part should be immediately overruled. Darrow and Raulston shook hands. After expressing concern that the courtroom floor might collapse from the weight of the many spectators, Raulston transferred the proceedings to the lawn outside the courthouse.
There, facing the jury, hung a sign--attached to the courthouse wall-- reading, "Read Your Bible. Raulston ordered the sign removed. Before a crowd that had swelled to about 5,, the defense read into the record, for purpose of appellate review, excerpts from the prepared statements of eight scientists and four experts on religion who had been prepared to testify.
The statements of the experts were widely reported by the press, helping Darrow succeed in his efforts to turn the trial into a national biology lesson. Dayton street scene, Supreme Court de Camp The next year, George W. Hunter published A New Civic Biology , updating the textbook Scopes supposedly used and presenting a very cautious treatment of evolution that did not even name the term.
Arthur Garfield Hays resumed his law practice, continuing to champion the underdog, and he died in Dudley Field Malone returned to his divorce law office, got divorced himself, remarried, and when his practice declined, became a Hollywood bit-part actor for about ten years, dying in Sue Hicks went on in law, got elected to the state legislature, and later became a judge.
Robinson continued to hustle as a druggist, opened up a second store in Spring City, and before his death in , aided in the development at Bryan College, serving as a founder, incorporator, and chairman of the Board of Trustees. Clarence Darrow took on two more cases and then retired to write, lecture, and travel. Senate in Neal, eccentric until his death in , ran unsuccessfully for senator or governor and one year for both in the same primary.
Mencken lived to see his American Mercury magazine taken over by ultra-conservative Christian Fundamentalists. After a stroke in , which made him unable to read or write, he died in In , the Butler Act was repealed de Camp , , Then in , Tennessee became the first state to pass an equal-time law which stipulated that evolution should be labeled as a theory and not a scientific fact and provided that alongside of evolution other theories, including the Genesis account, should be taught.
Ironically, in the fiftieth anniversary year of the Scopes Trial this so-called Genesis Bill was declared unconstitutional.
The entrepreneurship spirit of Dayton which initiated the Scopes Trial has survived the unfittest of situations and sparkles periodically. When Hollywood made the play Inherit the Wind into a movie, Dayton agreed to host the world premiere in A Scopes Trial Day was sponsored.
John T. Scopes returned and was given the key to the city. Twelve years later the city played host to another film premiere: The Darwin Adventure , with Francis Darwin, a descendant of Charles, as special guest. Participating on the panel were professors of law, history, and biology.
Several times Inherit the Wind has been dramatized at the courthouse. Since , Bryan College and the Dayton community have cooperated in organizing a four-day Scopes Trial Festival whose main feature is a documentary drama based almost entirely on the transcript of the trial and performed in the Scopes Trial courtroom. Allem, Warren. Davidson, Donald. The Tennessee. New York: Rinehart, The Great Monkey Trial.
Garden City: Doubleday, Fenwick W. Fecher, Charles A. Mencken: A Study of His Thought. New York: Knopf, Ginger, Ray. Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. New York: New American Library. Gorman, Laurel, and Kate Staiger.
An American Frontier. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, ed. Monkey Trial: the State of Tennessee vs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Harris, Robert C. Telephone interviews.
Larson, Edward J. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Inherit the Wind. New York: Bantam Books, Lawrence W. Mencken, H. Prejudices: Fifth Series. Olasky, Marvin N. Norman, Oklahoma, 6 Aug. Robinson, F. Why Dayton? Chattanooga: Andrews Printery,
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