The Scopes trial, a monumental legal confrontation, epitomizes the cultural clash between science and religion that unfolded in Dayton, Tennessee, during the sweltering summer of 1925. At the heart of this historic event was John Thomas Scopes, a seemingly unremarkable educator who became embroiled in a high-profile legal battle over the teaching of evolution in public schools, catalyzed by the Butler Act. The trial, orchestrated by local businessmen seeking to rejuvenate their economically depressed town, drew national attention and media frenzy, transforming a modest courtroom into a battleground for ideological warfare. As prominent figures such as Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan squared off, the proceedings illuminated the profound tensions between modernist perspectives and fundamentalist beliefs, a dichotomy that continues to resonate in contemporary discourse. In our exploration, we shall delve into the trial's origins, its societal implications, and the lasting legacy of this pivotal moment in American history.

Hosts: Michael and Alana are professional historians with a passion for bringing the most captivating and often overlooked criminal events of the past to light. ✨

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The sweltering afternoon of July 20, 1925, set the stage for a pivotal moment in American legal and cultural history as the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, became the epicenter of a national debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Within the Romanesque revival walls of the Rhea County Courthouse, a crowd exceeding 1,000 spectators gathered, their weight causing the very structure to groan ominously. The trial was a direct consequence of the Butler Act, legislation that prohibited the teaching of human evolution, and it attracted the nation's most formidable legal minds. Clarence Darrow represented the defense, while William Jennings Bryan, a prominent political figure and three-time presidential candidate, stood for the prosecution. This unprecedented confrontation was not merely a legal battle; it was a clash of ideologies, a fight over the very nature of truth and the intersection of science and religion. The trial was orchestrated by local business leaders as a publicity stunt to rejuvenate a struggling town, yet it spiraled into a media frenzy, with over 200 reporters descending upon Dayton, making it a spectacle witnessed across the globe, reflecting the deep cultural divides of the time and setting the stage for enduring debates over education and belief.

Takeaways:

• The Scopes trial of 1925 exemplified the cultural clash between modern scientific theories and traditional religious beliefs, particularly regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools.
• John Scopes, an unassuming figure, became the center of a highly publicized trial that was orchestrated to challenge the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee.
• William Jennings Bryan, a prominent political figure, represented the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, a renowned defense attorney, sought to dismantle the foundations of biblical literalism during the trial.
• The trial garnered unprecedented media attention, with over 200 journalists covering the event, marking a significant moment in the intersection of law, science, and public opinion in America.
• Despite the conviction of Scopes, the trial ignited a national debate over academic freedom and the role of religion in public education that continues to resonate today.
• The aftermath of the Scopes trial led to a chilling effect on biology education across the United States, with many textbooks omitting references to evolution for decades.

Inside the Romanesque revival walls of the Rhea County Courthouse, the indoor thermometer ticked past a grueling 100 degree mark.

A suffocating dense crowd of more than 1,000 spectators were packed into the second floor courtroom, their sheer physical mass causing the structural floor beams below to crack and groan audibly.

Fearing a catastrophic structural collapse, the presiding jurist, Judge John Tate Ralston, ordered the entire legal proceeding to be evacuated and re established outdoors on the shaded lawn of the courthouse.

There, under the relentless glare of the southern summer sun, Clarence Darrow, the nation's most formidable criminal defense attorney, squared off against William Jennings Bryan, a three time Democratic presidential candidate, in a verbal duel regarding the literal truth of the Holy Bible.

This unprecedented, highly volatile courtroom confrontation was captured in real time by telegraph operators sending a flurry of dispatches to the front page of every major newspaper across the globe.

Thousands of miles of telegraph wires were hung specifically for the purpose of reporting on what seemed at the time to be a momentous moment in history.

More than 200 reporters from all parts of the country, and even two from London, found their way to Dayton, a rural town in southeastern Tennessee not far from the Georgia border.

In the absolute center of this ideological hurricane stood a quiet, unassuming figure, John Thomas Scopes, a 24 year old football coach and substitute general science teacher.

John Scopes was not a radical political martyr, nor was he a zealous champion of secular scientific reform.

In his later memoirs, Scopes admitted he wasn't even sure he had even taught the subject for which he was now being legally prosecuted.

But he quickly found himself at the center of a legal and theological debate about the instruction of evolution in public public schools.

In fact, the whole crime and John Scope's starring role in the subsequent court case had been entirely concocted only a couple of months before.

He had been recruited by local business owners over carbonated sodas at the local Main street drugstore.

Those business owners wanted to find a way to put the economically depressed town of Dayton on the map.

And they thought that they could do that by hosting a court trial about a controversial topic.

The whole trial was at its core a highly engineered state sponsored media stunt from its very inception.

Yet the legal and profound ideological warfare it unleashed across the American landscape remains deadly serious.

Welcome to history's greatest crimes.

I'm Elena.

And I'm Michael.

And in this episode, we'll explore the context of the Butler act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution, human evolution, in public schools in Tennessee.

We'll look at the circumstances of Dayton, Tennessee, and examine who exactly John Scopes was.

And then we'll look at the court case that ultimately resulted in the intellectual suicide of the famous William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand.

And reveal a growing cultural divide between fundamentalists and modernists that still echo into the present.

Even more, our investigation will show that the Scopes trial was the foundational opening salvo of the modern American culture wars trial itself.

And its outcome exposed a terrifying democratic paradox that remains unsolved even into the 21st century.

Does a local majority possess the constitutional right to vote scientific reality out of a public classroom?

Or does the United States Constitution protect individual academic inquiry against the tyranny of the ballot box?

This act was named after Representative John Washington Butler, a Tennessee tobacco farmer and head of the World Christian Fundamentals association, and it prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools in Tennessee.

Butler, who later confessed to journalists that he had never heard of evolution before introducing the bill, explained that quote, I didn't know anything about evolution.

I read it in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was nonsense.

End quote.

Regardless, the resulting Butler act established a strict misdemeanor offense, declaring that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals and all other public schools of the state which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

In response, the American Civil Liberties Union, the aclu, published a statewide advertisement offering to defend anyone who was accused of teaching the theory of evolution in defiance of the Butler Act.

That work introduced the scientific theory that populations evolved over the course of generations through a process of natural selection.

Furthermore, it presented the argument that diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution.

A little over a decade later, Darwin also published a book called the Descent of Man.

In that landmark work, Darwin argued that humans shared a common evolutionary ancestry, with apes evolving through the same natural processes as other animals.

The cultural implications of Charles Darwin's theories were monumental.

Up to this point in time, most Christians accepted a theory known as creationism, which argues that the universe, earth and all life originated because of God's efforts and that he created everything during the process of a literal seven day time frame.

Darwin's new theories about evolution seem to directly contradict that literal interpretation of the Bible.

And they were even more controversial because his theories suggested that people were animals subject to natural laws and environmental pressures, not a special creation made in the direct image of God on a literal sixth day.

Over the next 50 years, knowledge of Darwin's theory of evolution spread and many Christian denominations came to accept the theory to some extent or another.

The gradual acceptance of evolution in popular culture pushed a lot of theologians to seek compromises, such as viewing evolution as God's chosen tool.

And many came to accept the theory that the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis was an allegory that was not intended to be interpreted literally.

While the popular acceptance of evolution happened slowly but surely, it certainly didn't include everyone.

A number of Christian groups rejected Darwin's theory.

They instead continued to believe that the Bible was entirely free from error and that it should be interpreted literally.

Besides issues with biblical interpretations related to evolution, some of those Christian groups rightly disliked the new pseudoscientific theory known as Social Darwinism that emerged out of Darwin's scientific theories.

Social Darwinism, a sociological idea that peaked around the turn of the century, attempted to apply the idea of natural selection to groups of people.

Proponents argued that certain groups of people were weaker or less evolved than other groups of people.

It's not hard to see how those ideas were largely based on pure racism.

And they were used to justify antisemitism, racism and the colonization and subjugation of other nations.

On one side were the fundamentalists who insisted on the timeless validity of each doctrine of Christian orthodoxy.

And on the other side were the modernists who advocated for a conscious adaptation of the Christian faith in response to new scientific discoveries like evolution and the moral pressures of the age.

It was about current events.

Post World War I, America was experiencing profound demographic changes.

And sociological anxieties.

This was due to an influx of immigrants and the migration of black Americans north, Combined with an economic drive to find better jobs in factories, Driving a larger consumer revolution of the time period.

This demographic inversion triggered a massive rural defensive rise In Christian fundamentalism As a reactionary political force against urbanization, industrialization, and secular northern intellectualism.

In other words, rural conservatives vocally, politically, and at times violently opposed people bringing in city norms and progressive culture to the rural rural countryside.

And more generally, the divide between country and city Became even more obvious Than it had ever before.

Those in the conservative countryside saw the cities as epicenters of socialism and unions and strikes.

So, as a backlash, rural Americans dug further into tradition, conservative religion and agricultural lifestyles in direct rejection of the diversity and modernity of urban areas.

William Jennings Bryan, A towering political figure of the time, Masterfully weaponized the grievances of the agrarian working class throughout the southeast.

From that point on, his speeches often involve religious as well as political themes.

And his speeches from that year, he suggested that they contributed to the, quote, unquote operation of the law of hate, the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak, end quote.

Bryan warned that it could undermine the foundations of morality.

In response to the sinking of the Lusitania, Bryan opposed American intervention in a European war.

But that still didn't mean he liked the Germans.

Instead, Bryan linked evolution to Germany.

He claimed that Darwinism provided a justification for the strong to dominate the weak and was therefore the source of German militarism and aggression.

During that time, he famously said that, quote, the science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers Is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.

And even more significantly, Bryan believed that the United States would suffer the same fate as Germany if evolution and social Darwinism Were allowed to remain an accepted theory in science and popular culture.

That year, he gave a speech called the Menace of Darwinism.

And at the same time, he encouraged state lawmakers to pass laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.

In addition to religion, though, Bryan and his populist followers also saw the Butler act in Tennessee as an exercise in majoritarian democracy.

This means that Bryan believed that taxpayers who funded public institutions should possess the absolute unalienable right to dictate the ideological content taught within those school walls.

That year, the American Civil Liberties Union, AKA the aclu, was seeking a test case to challenge the new state anti evolutionary laws.

But in subsequent years, the ACLU continued to aid anyone whose individual rights were infringed on by the government.

And they found their someone in the form of John Scopes in the small rural town of Dayton.

But this leads us then to our next question.

Why John Scopes?

And why Dayton, Tennessee?

Stay with us after this music break to find out.

This divide led to many states, particularly those in the rural south, to impose anti evolution measures in public education.

But even beyond those states that actually passed laws, the topic was widely discussed in some form.

The still relatively new ACLU saw the state laws being passed as an opportunity to use the organization to defend free speech in new ways.

So they began to look for someone who would be willing to legally implicate themselves in the crime of teaching evolution and go to trial in an effort to challenge the Butler Act.

But this brings us to our most important question.

Why John Scopes and Dayton, Tennessee?

Well, in the 19th and early 20th century, Tennessee experienced a significant growth in coal mining.

This was particularly the case in eastern Tennessee in the Appalachian Mountains.

And The Cumberland Plateau.

Coal prices were falling due to overproduction, and energy sources like oil and natural gas represented a growing competition.

As a result, the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, the primary industrial anchor of the surrounding county, was in danger of going bankrupt.

More specifically, it offered to pay all legal expenses and secure top tier legal counsel for any Tennessee teacher willing to challenge the constitutionality of the new act in court.

And this caught the eye of George for two reasons.

First, George personally believed in the theory of evolution.

George was a member of a progressive Methodist church that had accepted that Christian tenets and the idea of evolution could coexist.

George had actually grown up in New York City before graduating college and finding a job as a metallurgical engineer and the manager of the coal and iron company in Tennessee.

So he also hadn't grown up in the conservative culture of the rural state and region.

And second, but more importantly, George recognized that the community and the company he worked for could benefit economically from having what he knew would be a big trial.

Dayton had once been a proud town of modest homes and Main street with a big red brick courthouse and nine churches.

George recognized the controversial nature of the topic of evolution.

You could sort of think of it like rage bait of today.

Anything about it brought out strong opinions on both sides.

So when he read the article about the ACLU seeking to challenge the Butler act, he immediately realized that a sensational trial that pitted evolution against religion would flood the dying town with global media attention, wealthy tourists, real estate buyers, and much needed capital.

Supposedly, George threw down the article and ran to Robinson's drugstore on Main Street.

Robinson's drugstore included a soda fountain owned by Frank Earl Robinson, who also served as the president of the Rhea County School board.

Robinson, who held the retail concession for selling state approved textbooks, kept copies of George William Hunter's A Civic Biology on his shelves.

George ran in, yanked down a copy, and began to flip through the textbook.

Sure enough, the textbook framed evolution as a factual, foundational, scientific concept.

Here, George realized an interesting contradiction.

Teachers at public schools were not Permitted to teach about evolution.

And yet here it was included in the very biology textbook assigned to students at the public school down the road, Rhea County High School.

The next day, George gathered Frank Robinson, the president of the county school board and holder of the state approved textbooks.

Walter White, the county superintendent of schools, and Sue Hicks, a local attorney.

They met at a small round wire leg table in front of the soda fountain in the drugstore where George proposed his idea to host an ACLU backed trial.

In their tiny town.

These three leaders leaned more conservatively than George, so they must have initially been a bit shocked to learn that the liberal leaning George wanted to work with them to challenge an act that the locals generally supported.

But George showed them the textbook, which he used as evidence that while the Butler act was in effect, it wasn't actually effective.

The state's legislatures had passed the act with popular support, but the state science textbook explicitly described and endorsed the theory of evolution as well as scientific racism and eugenics.

According to Robinson, George told him and the two others, quote, as it is, the law is not enforced.

If you win, it will be enforced.

If I win, the law will be repealed.

We're game, aren't we?

End quote.

That was pretty bold, but it worked.

The three leaders proved open to George's idea.

But now came the next issue.

They needed a local teacher who would be willing to admit to teaching evolution in the classroom.

And this was an issue on two levels.

The most obvious being finding someone who would willingly implicate themselves not just to a crime, but one that most locals considered culturally offensive.

The other issue was that it was May and the public schools had already let out for the summer.

Many families in the region needed their kids available to work all summer, either in the fields or in the mines.

And most of the teachers wouldn't return for months to start the summer, the fall semester.

But then the group had an epiphany.

All of the teachers were gone except one.

That was 24 year old John Scopes, who had just finished his first year of teaching.

He primarily taught football and math, but he had substituted for the biology teacher for a few weeks the previous month after the Butler act passed.

Maybe he had said something about evolution in the classroom during that time.

Like many of the teachers at the school, John Scopes wasn't married and he planned to return home to visit his parents for the summer.

But coincidentally, he had delayed for leaving another week to spend a little more time with a local woman that he fancied.

And even better, they had just seen him playing tennis at the local clay courts down the road.

He was probably still there.

The scheming city leaders sent a messenger to retrieve Scopes.

John Scopes was a soft spoken man with a slender build, a head full of hair and large spectacles, and he arrived a short while later.

George Rapalaia and the others showed him the ACLU article and suggested that he might fit the part.

Unsurprisingly, Scopes was initially reluctant.

Not because he didn't believe in evolution.

He did.

But he explained that he had only served as a substitute biology teacher for a brief period of time in April while the regular teacher was ill. And he wasn't even sure that he had actually covered the topic of evolution during those few weeks.

However, George was a smooth talker and he convinced Scopes that the case was a harmless legal fiction that would save Dayton from economic ruin.

Once Scopes agreed to implicate himself, there was no dramatic arrest.

Instead, the four schemers at the drugstore walked down to the local police office, explained the crime that had taken place, and asked officers to issue a warrant for Scopes.

Soon after, police officers showed up at Scopes residence and he quietly surrendered.

He was briefly held before being released without having to post bond.

So Scopes had been arrested for the crime.

But now came the hard part, the actual legal proceedings and the press.

Stay with us after the music break to learn more about what happened to Scopes during his upcoming court case.

The main issue was that Scopes had only taught biology as a substitute teacher for a few weeks, and he wasn't actually sure he had covered the topic of evolution.

But that issue actually had a pretty easy fix.

Scopes instructed three of his own high school students to testify before a grand jury that he had taught them human evolution from the textbook.

Scopes literally coached the boys on what to say, advising them to tell the grand jury that he had explained how life developed from simple cells to complex organisms, revealing their lack of instruction on the actual topic.

One student later told reporters, I believe in part of evolution, but I don't believe in the monkey business.

End quote.

The local judge, eager to accommodate the town's booster plans, accelerated the grand jury proceedings.

Despite the meager evidence against him and the stories that questioned whether the willing defendant had ever taught evolution in the.

Classroom, the conspiracy was an immediate success.

Newspapers across the nation couldn't say enough about the upcoming trial, both negatively and positively.

The New York Times published a blistering editorial writing that the Tennessee law was a, quote, bizarre statute and warning that the trial would make the American legal system, quote, the laughing stock of the civilized world, end quote.

The Chicago Tribune also attacked the anti evolution movement, stating that the law was an attempt to, quote, shackle the human mind and chain it to a stake of medieval ignorance.

The most razor sharp critic during the trial itself was Henry Louis Menken, the chief correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.

Menken, who arrived in Dayton in a rumpled linen suit, immediately seized control of the narrative, coining the term monkey trial in his syndicated daily dispatches.

Menken did not pretend to be an objective reporter.

He was an intellectual assassin who viewed the trial trial as a golden opportunity to mock the rise of religious fundamentalism.

He described local citizens as yokels, gaping hillbillies and local primates, claiming that their peculiar imbecilities made Dayton a universal joke.

Mencken's caustic journalism had a profound polarizing effect on the trial's architecture.

His columns, reprinted daily in the local newspapers, provoked furious resentment among the people of Dayton, who felt deeply humiliated by the northern urban press.

In other newspapers, like the Nashville Tennessean, editors argued in defense of the Butler act and the prosecution of John Scopes by emphasizing the democratic right of taxpayers and parents to dictate what was taught in their own public schools.

The Chattanooga Daily Times framed the Butler act and other such anti evolution laws as a necessary barrier against northern intellectuals and secular organizations like the aclu.

The barbers pretended to punch him over his evolutionist views just to generate sensational headlines in metropolitan newspapers.

And in another of George Rapalaia's attempts to gain more press coverage, he apparently went so far as to write the British novelist H.G.

Wells, asking him to join the defense team.

Wells replied that he had no legal training in Britain, let alone the United States, and declined the offer.

The local booster committee, having raised a special $5,000 advertising fund, closed six blocks of Main street to all vehicular traffic, transforming it into a pedestrian mall lined with banners reading read your bible and prepare to meet thy God.

Outside the courthouse gates, street vendors sold lemonade, hot dogs and stuffed toy monkeys labeled Scopes ancestor, while traveling evangelists competed for space on the lawn with scam medicine salesmen.

The physical transformation of a quiet, agrarian courthouse yard into an ideological circus was financed and driven by the rapid expansion of the modern electronic mass media.

For the first time in global history, a criminal trial was broadcasted live across a continent.

Over 200 journalists from places like London, Paris, New York and Chicago descended on small Dayton, occupying every square foot of Bailey Hardware and the Morgan Furniture company, which had been converted into temporary press headquarters.

Ultimately, more than 2 million words were telegraphed out of Dayton during the 11 day trial, causing transatlantic cable tolls to spike to unprecedented levels, making the court.

Trial even more of an entertainment event.

Two trained chimpanzees were brought to town to perform tricks for amusement for thousands of tourists at a nearby boarding house.

The two chimps also famously performed a mock trial during which they impersonated John Scopes and his lawyers in tiny human suits and ties.

And at Hotel Aqua, a 35 room establishment on Main street reportedly raised its room rates from a standard 2.75per night to a then astronomical $8 per night, packing extra cots into every available hallway.

But while the local organizers, vendors and residents viewed the upcoming trial as a lucrative light hearted carnival that would benefit the town, the intellectual titans of the nation were preparing for a war to the death over the future of the American mind.

And as the trial commenced in the IDsummer heat of July 10, the citizens of Dayton began to realize that the forces they had unleashed were far larger than their small valley could ever hope to contain.

Within weeks of the first reports about the upcoming trial of the State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes on July 10, the media's influence was clear.

They would not simply report on what was going on.

Instead, they would play an active role in manufacturing the trial in real time.

And as a result, the nation and beyond became obsessed with what quickly came to be called the Scopes Monkey trial.

In popular culture.

As a result of the press coverage, the fundamentalist anti evolution politician William Jennings Bryan volunteered to assist the prosecution.

And in response, the famous lawyers Clarence Darrow and Dudley Field Malone offered their services to John Scopes and his defense team free of charge.

Clarence Darrow was an American lawyer and politician who became famous for high profile representation of trade union causes and criminal matters.

For example, he acted as the defense for Ossian Sweet, an American black American physician in Detroit, Michigan who was prosecuted and acquitted for murder when he used armed self defense against a hostile white mob.

Darrow was and continues to be considered one of the greatest lawyers of the 20th century.

Similarly, Dudley Field Malone was also famous, but he had earned his fame by winning the release of women's suffragists from jail leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

He went on to make a failed campaign for the Governor of New York and then turned to specialize in divorce cases for the wealthy, becoming known as the greatest international divorce lawyer in the early 20th century.

So the upcoming Scopes trial was not only gaining fame across popular culture in the nation, but it now also had some of the biggest legal names involved.

During the first days of the proceedings for the trial, the legal speeches of the lawyers reflected the deepening ideological split of the nation between fundamentalists and modernists.

While the prosecution prepared a statutory argument that focused on the state's relationship with teachers as employees and the actual transgression of the Butler act, the defense drafted a sweeping constitutional offensive.

Darrow and Malone planned to argue that the Butler act was void for vagueness, that it violated the teacher's individual rights under the 14th Amendment and that it established a sectarian religious test in violation of the Tennessee Constitution.

The defense entire legal strategy was to show that a teacher could not teach the mandatory state curriculum without violating the Butler act.

On page 194, the state accepted textbook displayed a detailed diagram of the evolutionary tree showing how simple protozoans gradually developed into complex vertebrates.

On page 195, the book placed human beings within the mammalian group of primates alongside monkeys and apes.

However, a modern forensic reading of the textbook reveals a deeply disturbing irony that both the prosecution and the defense largely ignored.

The textbook was not merely a guide to Darwinian evolution.

It was a manifesto for virulent white supremacy and aggressive social engineering.

On page 196, the textbook's author explicitly ranked what he called the five races of man along a strict evolutionary hierarchy, describing the Ethiopian type of of Africa, the Malay or Brown race of the Pacific, the American Indian and the Mongolian or yellow race, before concluding that the highest type of all was the, quote, Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America, end quote.

Perhaps even worse, under the heading of eugenics, the author warns students that families carrying traits like epilepsy, feeble mindedness and poverty were the, quote, true parasites on society, protected and cared for by the state out of the public money in poor houses and asylums.

The textbook wrote, quote, if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading, end quote.

But the prosecution, led by William Jennings Bryan, was less concerned about racism and social darwinism and more concerned that the ideas presented about evolution would teach children that they were merely animals and strip them of their divinely ordained moral worth.

During the trial, Brian chastised evolution for teaching children that humans were but one of 3,500 types of mammals.

And he bemoaned the notion that human beings were said to descent, quote, not even from American monkeys, but from old world monkeys.

Wow.

That wouldn't go over well in a modern courtroom.

Definitely not.

During the trial, the defense attempted to bring in eight experts on evolution to argue that there was no actual conflict between evolution and the creation account in the bible.

But other than one zoologist from John Hopkins university, the judge would not allow these experts to testify in person.

This led the defense and many of the pro evolution media and public to accuse the judge of being biased towards the prosecution.

It also didn't help that the defense that at the outset of the trial, the judge quoted Genesis and the butler act, and he emphatically warned the jury not to judge the merit of the law, which was quickly becoming the focus of the trial, but on the violation of the act, which he called a, quote, high misdemeanor.

But the defense lawyers made a good case, arousing fears of inquisitions.

Dudley Malone argued that the Bible should be preserved in the realm of theology and morality and not put in a course of science.

He also declared that William Jennings Bryan's duel to the death against evolution should not be made one sided by a court ruling that took away the chief witnesses for the defense.

Malone promised there would be no duel because, quote, there is never a duel with the truth, end quote.

In response to Malone's speech, the courtroom went wild.

The proceedings were moved to the courthouse lawn to escape the stifling July heat and the very real threat of a structural actual floor collapse inside the building.

A lot of people were trying to watch this trial.

While standing outside before the judge and the assembled crowd, the defense took the unorthodox step of calling Brian as a witness to question him on the Bible as an expert.

Darrow noted that since the defense's own expert witnesses had been rendered irrelevant, then they would use a witness who the judge judge clearly preferred.

At the time.

The legal maneuver appeared spontaneous.

But in reality, Darrow and Malone had worked through the night to prepare for this moment.

The previous evening, they brought together the expert witnesses who were supposed to testify for the defense in court.

They all worked together to prepare topics and questions for the defense to address Brian on the witness stand.

Interestingly, the chairman of the geology department of Harvard, who also was a devout Baptist, played Brian and answered questions he would believe Brian would answer.

When Darrow called Brian to the stand, the prosecution frantically objected that the testimony was completely irrelevant to the single factual question of whether Scopes had in fact taught human evolution.

But Brian agreed to testify.

With confidence radiating from his voice.

He declared, quote, I want the Christian world to know that any atheist, agnostic, unbeliever can question me anytime as to my belief in God, end quote.

This decision by Bryan was a fatal act of hubris that violated every fundamental rule of trial practice and evidence.

Under standard common law rules of evidence, A witness may only testify to facts within their personal knowledge.

Or, if qualified as an expert, to specialize scientific or technical matters.

Bryan was neither a scientific expert nor a trained biblical scholar.

He was a political orator whose knowledge of scripture was deeply felt but intellectually shallow.

Darrow, one of the most brilliant cross examiners in American legal history, had spent decades dissecting hostile witnesses in front of juries.

He knew that by coaxing Bryan onto the stand, he could bypass the judge's prior rulings that had excluded actual scientific experts from testifying in person.

Darrow was not trying to win the trial.

He knew Scopes.

His conviction was a foregone conclusion, since the judge was clearly only focused on whether that he had taught evolution and transgressed the law or not.

Instead, Darrow set a psychological and intellectual trap designed to dismantle the very foundations of biblical literalism on a global stage.

The questions that Darrow asked Brian revolved around several biblical stories and Brian's beliefs.

He asked Brian if he believed that Jonah had been literally swallowed by a whale, lived in its body for days, and then returned to humanity to tell the tale.

In response, Brian asserted absolute faith in the divine capacity to execute miracles, regardless of biological impossibility.

In another instance, Darrow referenced the story of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still.

He asked if Brian believed that.

Brian stumbled, first stating that he believed it to be true.

But then he quickly corrected himself, saying, quote, no, I believe that the earth goes around the sun, end quote.

Darrow then asked Brian where Cain got his wife, to which Brian answered that he would, quote, leave the agnostics to hunt for her, end quote.

Finally, Darrow asked Brian if he thought that the earth was made in six days.

Brian responded that, quote, my impression as they were periods, but I would not attempt to argue against anybody who wanted to believe in literal days, end quote.

In that answer, Brian seemed to abandon strict literalism, admitting that the days of Genesis may have in fact been vast geological periods.

He had, in effect, conceded the entire intellectual foundation of his movement to Clarence Darrow.

If the days of creation were millions of years long, then there was ample time for the very processes of gradual biological evolution described in the biological textbook under question to happen.

As the afternoon sun beat down, the exchange devolved into raw, visceral hatred.

Brian, sensing his humiliation, stood up on the platform, his face drenched in sweat.

Shaking his fist at Darrow, he said, quote, your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony.

The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, end quote.

In response, Darrow shouted, quote, I object to your statement.

I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes, end quote.

Brian then shouted back, quote, I am simply trying to protect the word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States, end quote.

Finally, the judge banged his gavel and adjourned the court until nine o'clock the following morning.

He would later rule that the entire two hours of Brian's testimony was completely irrelevant to the factual question of Scopes guilt, ordering it stricken from the official record.

But the damage was done.

The transcript had already been telegraphed to every major newspaper on Earth.

As we explained before the music break, the defense lawyers for John Scopes knew pretty much from the beginning that Scopes would be found guilty.

That became clear as soon as the judge announced that the jury should only arrive at their verdict based on whether or not Scopes had transgressed the law by teaching evolution in the local high school.

After the Butler act was passed On.

Tuesday morning, July 21, the jury was brought in for the lawyers to give their final remarks.

The lawyer for defense, Clarence Darrow, told them, we claim that the defendant is not guilty.

But as the court has excluded any testimony except as to the one issue as to whether Scopes taught that man descended from a lower order of animals.

And we cannot contradict that testimony.

There is no logical thing to come except that the jury find a verdict that we may carry to the higher court Purely as a matter of proper procedure.

We do not think it is fair to the court of counsel on the other side to waste a lot of time.

When we know that this is the inevitable result.

And probably the best result for the case.

In other words, Dara was saying that he knew that the jury would judge John Scopes guilty.

Because they were only allowed to concern themselves with whether Scopes had broke the law as stated.

Darrow suggested that that was okay because they intended to appeal the decision in higher courts anyway.

Interestingly, Darrow's final remarks didn't count as a final summation.

And according to Tennessee law, when the defense waives its right to make a closing speech, the prosecution was also barred from summing up its case.

That prevented Bryan for presenting his prepared summation.

Nonetheless, Brian distributed his summation to reporters who then published it.

The final statement reinforced the fundamentalist modernist dispute.

He wrote, if civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.

His teachings and his teachings alone can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.

End quote.

After eight days of trial, it took the jury only nine minutes to deliberate.

Scopes was found guilty on July 21 and ordered to pay a $100 fine.

But what's even more significant to the outcome of the trial?

The judge imposed the mentioned fine before John Scopes was given an opportunity to say anything about why the court should not oppose punishment upon him.

After this error was pointed out to the judge, the defendant, John Scope, spoke for the first and only time in court.

He said, quote, your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute.

I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can.

Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom.

That is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution of personal and religious freedom.

I think the fine is unjust.

End quote.

But Scopes statements did nothing to change the outcome of his court trial.

He was convicted, and the Baltimore sun newspaper paid his 100 fine.

That court upheld the constitutionality of the Butler act and ruled that the state legislature possessed the absolute right to direct the curriculum of the schools it funded.

The Tennessee Supreme Court judges also rejected the defense's arguments that the term evolution used in the act was too broad a term.

It also rejected Scopes lawyers arguments that the statute violated his constitutional right to speech.

The court instead held that as an employee of the state, Scoped speech could be regulated by the state.

And finally, the court rejected the defense's argument that the Butler act violated the Tennessee state constitution which stated that it was the duty of the state government to cherish literature and science.

The argument was that the theory of the descendant of man from a lower order of animals was now established in scientific thought and that the prohibition of teaching such a theory was a violation of the legislative duty to cherish science.

But the court rejected that argument, holding that the determination of what laws cherish science was an issue for the legislature, not the judiciary.

But here's the thing.

Despite rejecting the main arguments of the defense, the Tennessee Supreme Court judges threw out John Scopes conviction.

And they did so because of legal technicality.

So the Tennessee Supreme Court announced that the Butler act would remain in effect and John Scopes conviction would be scrubbed from the books.

However, the judges weren't done with surprises.

One of the justices ended the ruling by adding an unexpected recommendation.

He said, quote, the court is informed that the plaintiff and era is no longer in the service of the state.

We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.

On the contrary, we think that the peace and dignity of the state will be the better conserved by the entry of a nolle prosecque here and in quote.

This inclusion here meant that the prosecutor was declining to further pursue the case against the defendant.

And the ACLU and Scopes lawyers could not appeal the verdict then to the United States Supreme Court.

So that was it for the case of the state of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes.

But what became of everyone involved?

That's the most interesting question.

You may have noticed that in its ruling, the Tennessee Supreme Court noted that John Scopes was no longer in the service of the state.

The Outcome of the trial affected Scopes both professionally and personally.

His public image was mocked by animation, cartoons and other media during the seceding years.

It's no surprise that John Scopes wanted to get out of town.

At that time, Scopes wrote to a friend, quote, I am tired of fooling with them, end quote.

It was evident that the media's attention was affecting Scopes emotionally.

After Scopes graduation, he was barred from career opportunities in Tennessee.

But he seemed to have no desire to be there anymore anyway.

Instead, he took a job as a field engineer with Gulf Oil in Venezuela.

He eventually got married, had two sons, and followed the oil to Beeville, Texas, and then Shreveport, Louisiana, before he died of cancer at the age of 70.

The press continued to hound John Scopes after the trial until he left the county.

But it saved its most vicious mockery for William Jennings Bryan, the city of Dayton, the state of Tennessee, the entire south, as well as fundamentalist Christians and anti evolutionists.

Life magazine awarded Brian the, quote, brass medal of the fourth class for having successfully demonstrated by the alchemy of ignorance that hot air may be transmuted into gold and that the Bible is infallibly inspired except where it differs from him on the question of wine, women and wealth, end quote.

Other mainstream newspapers portrayed him as an aging politician out of touch with the modern world.

Coverage frequently focused on Brian's declining mental acuity and highlighted his increasingly desperate demeanor.

As the trial progressed, the media's attacks devastated Brian.

Rightly or wrongly, he had spent most of his life fighting for the working class farmer, believing he was protecting them from the cold, godless brutality of northern intellectualism.

Now he was being mocked globally as a superstitious buffoon.

Stroke.

His body exhausted by the heat, his severe diabetes and the crushing weight of public humiliation, the death of Brian plunged.

The nation into a period of intense mourning and bitter recrimination.

To his followers, he was a Christian soldier who had literally sacrificed his life on the altar of Dayton to protect the Faith of America's children.

To his detractors, his death was the tragic, logical conclusion of a life spent resisting the inevitable advance of modern science.

As we mentioned before, the defense lawyers Darrow and Malone both went on to have amazingly successful legal careers.

Unfortunately, the ACLU didn't have as positive an outcome.

The organization had spent over $20,000 trying to get a federal ruling on academic freedom just to have the Tennessee supreme Court rip that opportunity away.

The immediate legacy of the Scopes trial was a profound, silent, chilling effect that paralyzed biology education across America.

Terrified of facing similar public circuses, national textbook publishers quietly scrubbed all mentions of Charles Darwin, natural selection and human evolution from their high school biology textbooks for decades.

It was not until the height of the space race that the legal ghost of John Scopes was finally exercised.

And that case, Susan Epperson, a 24 year old high school biology teacher in Little Rock, challenged an Arkansas statute that, like the Butler act, made it a crime to teach that human beings descended from a lower order of animals.

Supreme court justice Abe Fortis, writing for a unanimous court, struck down the Arkansas anti evolution law.

Under the establishment clause of the first amendment.

Ford has declared, quote, the first amendment does not permit the state to require that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma.

Arkansas's law selects from the body of knowledge a particular segment which it prescribes for the sole reason that it deemed to conflict with a particular interpretation of the book of Genesis by a particular religious group group, end quote.

But even with an ultimate supreme court ruling, the battle was not over.

It simply mutated.

When the courts banned outright prohibitions on evolution, Fundamentalist legislatures began passing, quote, balance treatment laws.

In that case, Donald Aguilar, a high school biology teacher, sued the state, arguing that the balanced treatment law lacked any secular purpose.

Supreme court justice William J. Brennan, Jr.

Struck down the Louisiana law in a 7:2 decision.

That ruling established that states cannot use public classrooms to advance a religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind.

However, the underlying cultural and political forces that created the Butler act did not disappear.

They simply adopted new semantic strategies.

What began as a desperate backroom scheme by a small town metallurgical engineer and a school board president to save their local economy from bankruptcy ended up setting off a legal chain reaction that redefined the constitutional base boundaries of the American classroom.

John Scopes became the human bridge between two wildly different eras of American history.

He was the catalyst for a decades long judicial evolution that transformed the First Amendment from a sleepy, rarely enforced check on federal power into a robust living shield protecting individual academic freedom and scientific integrity from majoritarian democratic decisions.

Today, if you walk onto the manicured lawn of the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, you will see a physical manifestation of this perpetual American conflict.

On one side of the lawn, a bronze statue of William Jennings Bryan stands with his chin thrust forward, frozen in eternal defense of his faith.

Directly opposite him on the other side of the grass stands a matching bronze statue of of Clarence Darrow, his thumbs tucked into his suspenders, staring down his old rival.

A century after the ink dried on the Scopes transcript, the battle they fought under those maple trees is not a dusty museum piece.

It is being re litigated in every school board meeting, every curriculum vote, every state legislative session across the United States.

The names of the textbooks in the exact scientific theories may have changed, but the fundamental struggle over who owns the minds of American children remains exactly the same.

Thanks for listening to history's greatest crimes.

I'm Elena.

And I'm Michael.

Until next time.

Stay curious,.

Sam.