The Scopes Trial at Dayton

In the summer of nineteen twenty-five, a small town in Rhea County became, for a few weeks, the most watched place in the United States. The town was Dayton, population about eighteen hundred. The trial was State of Tennessee v.

John Thomas Scopes, and it concerned whether a high school biology teacher had violated the Butler Act, a state law signed that March prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. The case had been engineered. The American Civil Liberties Union had advertised for a Tennessee teacher willing to be a test case, and the Dayton business community, hoping for publicity, persuaded the young football coach and substitute teacher John Scopes to volunteer.

Scopes later said he was not entirely sure whether he had actually taught evolution at all, though he had covered the relevant chapter from the state-approved textbook. What no one anticipated was William Jennings Bryan. Three times the Democratic presidential nominee, former Secretary of State, the greatest orator of the populist era, Bryan volunteered to prosecute.

The defense countered with Clarence Darrow, the most celebrated defense attorney in America. Reporters flooded the town. H.

L. Mencken covered it for the Baltimore Sun with barely concealed contempt for everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line. It was the first American trial broadcast live on national radio.

Darrow's masterstroke came near the end: he called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible. The examination lasted two hours in the summer heat. Bryan died five days after the verdict, which found Scopes guilty and fined him one hundred dollars.

The Butler Act remained on the books in Tennessee until nineteen sixty-seven.