The Rhea County, TN Courthouse where the trial took place.
By Mike Reid
August 26, 2025
This year, 2025, marks the centennial of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. It took place in the small town of Dayton in Rhea County, Tennessee in July of 1925, and quickly became one of the most famous and controversial trials in U.S. history. Most people know it as a legal battle over the separation of church and state, as an academic conflict between modern science and Christian creationism, or as a monumental courtroom clash between two of the most famous attorneys in the country at the time. There is some truth to all three of these, but the whole truth is much more complex, and much of what most people believe about it today is myth. Over the decades following the trial, the story has become sensationalized, mythologized, and shaped to benefit different agendas.
The story surrounding the case of The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes (1925) or the “Scopes Monkey Trial” as the contemporary press would dub it, did not begin with the persecution of a brave and enlightened young biology teacher who was simply trying to educate his students in modern biology as most people now believe. On the contrary, the whole affair was engineered by the then fledgling American Civil Liberties Union and a group of Dayton businessmen. The ACLU wanted a court case that they could use to challenge the recently enacted Butler Act, a Tennessee state statute that prohibited the teaching in Tennessee public schools of any scientific principle which denied the divine creation of humans as taught in the Bible. Any teacher who taught Darwinian evolution would be in violation of the Butler Act. The ACLU could then appeal a conviction up to the federal courts and hopefully get them to declare it and other such emerging laws unconstitutional. They just needed a Tennessee public school teacher to teach evolution, stand trial, and be convicted of violating the statute.
The Dayton businessmen wanted to bring some notoriety to their economically declining town that they hoped would give it a much needed economic shot in the arm. Upon learning of the ACLU’s interest, the businessmen recruited 24-year-old Rhea Central High School teacher John Scopes to voluntarily be prosecuted for violation of the statute. Scopes was not the school’s regular biology teacher. He was primarily their football coach, but he had served as a substitute teacher in a biology class for a few weeks in the past school year. It was not even clear that while teaching biology Scopes had ever actually taught evolution in a way that would violate the Butler Act. In fact, his lessons came straight out of the state approved textbook. To the ACLU attorneys and the businessmen who were manufacturing the case, that did not matter. The ACLU had their legal test case and the businessmen had their publicity stunt.
The case garnered enough press coverage to gain the notice of William Jennings Bryan, a famous orator, lawyer, politician, three-time presidential candidate, devout Christian, and vehement opponent of the Theory of Evolution. Bryan, who saw Darwinian evolution as a threat to Christian morality and the very fabric of American society, traveled to Dayton to aid in the prosecution of Scopes. To him, this was not merely a court case over a little-known state statute. It was part of a much larger struggle of Christianity against an amoral scientific theory that debased humanity and pushed God out of the classroom. It could even lead to (gasp!) atheism!
Upon learning of Bryan’s involvement in the case, Clarence Darrow who was arguably the most prominent defense lawyer in the country at the time and a critic of Bryan, offered to aid in Scopes’ defense. Darrow, an agnostic, saw the case as a battle of enlightened modern science against an outdated and repressive mythology. Against the wishes of the ACLU, Scopes accepted Darrow as one of his defense attorneys. Bryan and Darrow had known each other for years. In fact Darrow had supported Bryan in his first and unsuccessful presidential campaign, but by 1925 their relationship had soured.
With the involvement of Bryan and Darrow, The Scopes Monkey Trial became international news. Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken, an ally of Darrow and one of the most widely read newspaper columnists of the era, travelled to Dayton to cover it. Once the trial began, clashing egos, legal theatrics and contentious exchanges between Darrow and the presiding judge, John Raulston, caused it to take on a farcical circus-like feel. Someone even brought a chimpanzee to the courthouse. Biting daily commentary by Mencken and continuous coverage by other reporters, including the 26-year old female reporter Nellie Kenyon of the Chattanooga News, fueled public interest. The trial became more of a gladiatorial contest between Bryan and Darrow than a serious legal matter. Think of Godzilla vs King Kong, but in a courtroom. Probably most bizarre of all, in desperation defense attorney Darrow asked to put prosecutor Bryon on the witness stand and examine him as an expert witness on the Bible. Surprisingly, Bryan agreed to it and Raulston allowed it.
Statue of Clarence Darrow on the courthouse lawn.
Statue of William Jennings Bryan on the courthouse lawn.
The ACLU quickly lost control of the defense and John Scopes became increasingly irrelevant to the affair that bore his name. Reporters and members of the public who were there to see a show filled the small Rhea County courtroom beyond its capacity. Judge Raulston, concerned that the floor of the building might not sustain the weight of so many people and also to escape the sweltering summer heat, moved the trial outside to the lawn in front of the building. After much acrimony, legal drama bordering on the absurd, and saturation press coverage, the jury convicted Scopes of a misdemeanor and the judge fined him $100. Scopes knew that he would never have to pay it. Perhaps as a gesture of magnanimity or to show that the whole thing had never really been about him, Bryan offered to pay Scope’s fine for him.
At first it seemed that each of the protagonists in this drama got what they wanted. The ACLU had their court ruling to appeal. Dayton got an economic boost. Bryan, relishing his victory, believed that he had successfully defended Christianity in God’s country and defeated the heathenistic and morally debasing Theory of Evolution. A fundamentalist Christian college, Bryan College, was founded in Dayton a few years later and named in his honor. It’s still there. Darrow, although losing the case, felt that he had effectively made a fool of Bryan, which might have been his underlying if unspoken aim all along.
However, things did not ultimately turn out for them in the ways they intended. Unfortunately for the ACLU, the Tennessee Supreme Court later dismissed the case on a technicality, so they lost their opportunity to appeal. More unfortunately for Bryan, he died five days later. Unfortunately, for Dayton, the economic boost was less than hoped for and did not last. Darrow moved on to other cases. Scopes left town. The legal case faded away, but the controversy did not.
One hundred years on, the Scopes Trial remains a subject of intense scrutiny and controversy. The Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation (RHPF), a local historical society, preserves the venue and history of this most famous event in their town’s history. Each July, they hold a commemoration of the trial and dramatize it in a play titled Destiny in Dayton. Local amateur actors perform the play in the courthouse where the trial took place. This is not the highly fictionalized 1955 play Inherit the Wind and its later film adaptations from which unfortunately most people know of the trial. Destiny in Dayton is much more historically accurate and most of the dialog is taken from the actual trial transcripts.
In July 2025, on the centennial of the trial, the RHPF held a commemoratory symposium titled “Evolving Conflict: Scopes at 100” in the Rhea County Courthouse where the trial was held. The building no longer functions as a courthouse. It now contains county and other offices, but thanks to preservation efforts the exterior of the building and the interior courtroom look much as they did at the time of the famous trial. There are now statues of Bryan and Darrow on the lawn in front of the building as well as some historical markers.
I attended the Evolving Conflict symposium in Dayton, which took place on July 18-19th. Upon arriving at the Rhea County Courthouse, I was disturbed to see a large banner sign reading “Read Your Bible” attached to the front of the building. This would be highly inappropriate for a public building. I later learned that it was a facsimile of a sign that hung there in 1925. The RHPF had placed it there to make the building look more as it did at the time. Furthermore, the original sign had been the subject of a heated exchange between Darrow and Bryan during the trial and was historically significant. Once I understood that it was a relevant historical prop and not just a cynical attempt at evangelism, I changed my mind about it.
The courthouse with the infamous "Read Your Bible" banner.
The symposium ran over two days and consisted of talks by scientists, historians, and yes, creationists. The talks focused primarily on the events leading up to the Scopes Trial, the historical context in which it occurred and its legacy. Speakers pointed out that up until the middle of the nineteenth century, few people saw religion and science to be in conflict. For them, natural philosophy as it was then called was just an extension of Christian theology. In fact, the term “science” did not come into common use until around that time. It was not until the publication of Charles Darwin’s famous On the Origin of Species in 1859 that the two realms or “magisteria” as the famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould would one day call them, diverged and most conflict between them arose. Furthermore, a revival of Protestant evangelism began in the latter decades of the century, particularly in the United States, and continued into the next.
One speaker, a local attorney who had argued cases in that courtroom during his long career, discussed the legal context of the Butler Act and some little-known details about the trial and its effect on the town. Another speaker discussed the historical and political impact of the trial on American society at large over the decades that followed. A biology professor who is a devout Christian, but fully accepts Darwinian evolution and the antiquity of the Earth, somewhat disparagingly talked about how fundamentalists have negatively responded to evolutionary theory over the following decades. Although I have no interest in reconciling science and religion and consider them to be inherently antithetical to each other, I found his talk quite engaging. A well regarded paleoanthropologist informed the audience about some of the fascinating recent findings in the field of human origins, one of my favorite subjects.
The only speaker whom I had any real problem with was a creationist “scientist” who in the course of what would otherwise have been an historically interesting account of the development of creationist thought since the mid-nineteenth century, seemed to subtly jab at evolutionary theory. Without attacking evolutionary theory directly, he cited many examples where scientific consensus and our imagining of extinct creatures have repeatedly changed over time. I think this was just a gentle repackaging of that old creationist strategy of casting doubt on the validity of scientific principles by pointing out how scientists supposedly keep changing their minds and therefore must not really know what they are talking about. He seemed to not understand or more likely chose to disregard the iterative, self-correcting, and rigid evidence-based process of the scientific method. Yes, scientists constantly modify and often replace older ideas with new ones, but eventually as they gather more data and complete more analyses, understandings of nature converge on basic truths and stabilize. This can take years or even centuries, but it eventually happens. Our understanding of organic evolution has progressed greatly since Darwin’s time and we continue to learn more, but the fundamental tenets of his brilliant theory still hold today. Nearly every reputable natural scientist now accepts Darwinian evolution as a fundamental basis of modern biology.
During the week, the RHPF staged several performances of Destiny in Dayton. Watching the play performed in the very room where the historic events that it depicts transpired was the highlight of my time in Dayton.
I think that the Evolving Conflict symposium was a great success. Although I have long been fascinated by the Scopes Trial and have studied it, I always find more to learn. As an ardent evolutionist and atheist, I consider Biblical creationism to be harmful pseudoscience. Nevertheless, I gained a feel for how the other side thinks and operates. To paraphrase the ancient Chinese military theorist, General Sun Tzu: Know your enemy.
The courtroom where it all happened. The judge's bench is in the back.
Science and Biblical creationism have clashed in American courtrooms multiple times since the Scopes Trial, most notably in the cases of Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968, Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987, and Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005. The Epperson case ultimately made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that an Arkansas law similar to Tennessee’s Butler Act violated the Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution which mandates the separation of church and state. This federal ruling invalidated all such state laws. In the Edwards case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law that required creationism to be taught alongside evolution in public schools also violated the Establishment Clause and was therefore unconstitutional. Finally, in the Kitzmiller case, creationists deceptively tried to slip their religious doctrine into Pennsylvania public schools under the guise of “Intelligent Design.” Fortunately, the judge saw through their ruse and in a scathing 139 page finding ruled against them. In all three of those cases, science won.
Although science has usually prevailed over creationism in American courts since the Scopes Trial, creationists have never accepted defeat. Undeterred by prior defeats, unconcerned with evidence, and driven by religious zeal, they continue to attack modern science in schools, museums, and other public forums. Sometimes their attacks are overt, such as with the ridiculous but glitzy Creation Museum and Ark Encounter monstrosity in Kentucky. Other times they are subtle, quiet, or indirect, such as persuading state school boards to insert disclaimers into biology textbooks.
A scientifically literate person today might feel dismayed that more than a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species and a full century after Scopes we are still having arguments over science and religion, but such is the current reality. Creationism is the spawn of religious fundamentalism. And in my opinion, religious fundamentalism is the greatest threat to civilization today. For fundamentalists, advocating Biblical creationism is just one theater of battle in their multi-pronged war against enlightened modernity. In the United States, this takes the form of rising Christian nationalism. Bolstered by well-funded think tanks and political victories at all levels of government, they are attempting to impose upon this country a form of theocratic fascism that threatens not just science and freedom of thought, but reason itself. Not all Biblical creationists are Christian nationalists, but their agendas do overlap. Historians show us that the more we understand the past, the more we understand the present. The Scopes Trial speaks as loudly to us today as it did one hundred years ago.
Mike Reid is a secular activist and a former president of WASH
[
An abbreviated version of this essay appeared in the September/October issue of WASHline.]
