Presented at the North Carolina Graduate Student History Conference (2012).
On March 21, 1925, Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed into law a bill deeming it unlawful for any public school teacher “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.” Peay declared that day that he did not think the law, which carried a maximum fine of $500, would ever be put to use. Little did he suspect that four months later this law would bring about what would be called “The World’s Most Famous Court Trial,” the most influential science/religion event in American memory. That July, twenty-three-year-old high school science teacher John T. Scopes would be prosecuted for teaching evolution, and national celebrities, like three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, and smart-aleck journalist H.L. Mencken, would descend upon the town of Dayton, Tennessee to battle before an international audience.
Most Americans familiar with the story have heard that the people of Tennessee felt threatened by science, that John Scopes stood up heroically for academic freedom, and that William Jennings Bryan and his fellow fundamentalist Christians made utter fools of themselves defending an outdated and intolerant religion. This traditional narrative has cast the trial as a symbol of the perennial American struggles between liberty and oppression, open-mindedness and bigotry, progress and tradition, and science and religion. And because these struggles remain with us, the Scopes Trial continues to figure prominently in American memory. One need only peruse an article on a contemporary science/religion issue to discover that no present controversy can escape the context that the famous “Monkey” Trial continues to supply, for good or ill…