The Scopes Trial Courthouse: Dayton's Summer of Argument

You are near Dayton, Tennessee, and the red-brick building at the center of the square is one of the most argued-over courthouses in American history. In July of nineteen twenty-five, it hosted the Scopes Trial, and for eleven days the rest of the world could not look away.

The backstory begins with a law. Earlier that year, Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signed the Butler Act, the first statute in the United States banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. The American Civil Liberties Union immediately announced it would fund a test case. Leaders in Dayton, partly hoping to put their small town on the map, recruited a local science teacher named John Thomas Scopes to serve as the defendant. Scopes agreed.

What followed exceeded anyone's expectations. Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense attorney in the country and a committed agnostic, came down to represent Scopes. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist Christian, volunteered for the prosecution. Journalist H.L. Mencken arrived from Baltimore and sent dispatches that mocked the town in the newspapers of half the nation. Ten thousand visitors descended on Dayton each day. The trial was among the first ever broadcast live on radio.

Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars, which was the expected outcome. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the conviction two years later on a technicality, not on the underlying law. The Butler Act itself stayed on the books until nineteen sixty-seven.

What the trial actually settled was less than either side claimed. Evolution remained banned in Tennessee schools for another generation. But the public theater of it, Darrow calling Bryan himself to the stand and pressing him on the literal truth of Genesis, shifted something in the national conversation. Bryan died five days after the verdict.

The courthouse has been restored to its nineteen twenty-five appearance and now houses the Scopes Trial Museum. The building itself, a three-story Romanesque structure completed in eighteen ninety-one, still holds court. Dayton is still a small town. The argument it hosted has never really stopped.