The Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, occurred as the outcome of accumulated improbability. The Butler Act, passed by the Tennessee legislature and signed by Gov. Austin Peay on March 21, 1925, declared it “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.” The bill could have been beaten with little trouble had the opposition bothered to organize and lobby (as they had the previous year in Kentucky, when a similar bill in similar circumstances went down to easy defeat). The senate passed it with no enthusiasm, assuming a gubernatorial veto. One member said of Mr. Butler: “The gentleman from Macon wanted a bill passed; he had not had much during the session and this did not amount to a row of pins; let him have it.” But Peay, admitting the bill’s absurdity and protesting that the legislature should have saved him from embarrassment by defeating it, signed the act as an innocuous statement of Christian principles: “After a careful examination,” wrote Peay, “I can find nothing of consequence in the books now being taught in our schools with which this bill will interfere in the slightest manner. Therefore it will not put our teachers in any jeopardy. Probably the law will never be applied…. Nobody believes that it is going to be an active statute.” (See Ray Ginger’s Six Days or Forever? for a fine account of the legislative debate.)
If the bill itself was improbable, Scopes’s test of it was even more unlikely. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offered to supply council and provide legal costs for any teacher willing to challenge the act by courting an arrest for teaching evolution. The test was set for the favorable urban setting of Chattanooga, but plans fell through. Scopes didn’t even teach biology in the small, inappropriate, fundamentalist town of Dayton, located forty miles north of Chattanooga. He had been hired as an athletic coach and physics teacher but had substituted in biology when the regular instructor (and principal of the school) fell ill. He had not actively taught evolution at all, but merely assigned the offending textbook pages as part of a review for an exam. When some town boosters decided that a test of the Butler Act might put Dayton on the map—none showed much interest in the intellectual issues—Scopes was available only by another quirk of fate. (They would not have asked the principal, an older, conservative family man, but they suspected that Scopes, a bachelor and free thinker, might go along.) The school year was over, and Scopes had intended to depart immediately for a summer with his family. But he stayed on because he had a date with “a beautiful blonde” at a forthcoming church social.
Scopes was playing tennis on a warm afternoon in May, when a small boy appeared with a message from “Doc” Robinson, the local pharmacist and owner of Dayton’s social center, Robinson’s Drug Store. Scopes finished his game, for there is no urgency in Dayton, and then ambled on down to Robinson’s, where he found Dayton’s leading citizens crowded around a table, sipping Coke and arguing about the Butler Act. Within a few minutes, Scopes had offered himself as the sacrificial lamb. From that point, events accelerated and began to run along a predictable track. William Jennings Bryan, who had stirred millions with his “Cross of Gold” speech and almost become president as a result, was passing his declining years as a fundamentalist stumper—“a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt,” as H. L. Mencken remarked. He volunteered his services for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow responded in kind for the defense. The rest, as they say, is history. Of late, it has, alas, become current events as well.
Robinson’s Drug Store is still the social center of Dayton, although it moved in 1928 to its present location in the shadow of the Rhea County courthouse, where Scopes faced the wrath of Bryan’s God. “Sonny” Robinson, Doc’s boy, has run the store for decades, dispensing pills to the local citizenry and thoughts about Dayton’s moment of fame to the pilgrims and gawkers who stop by to see where it all started. The little round table, with its wire-backed chairs, occupies a central place, as it did when Scopes, Doc Robinson, and George Rappelyea (who made the formal “arrest”) laid their plans in May 1925. The walls are covered with pictures and other memorabilia, including Sonny Robinson’s only personal memory of the trial: a photograph of a five-year-old boy, sitting in a carriage and pouting because a chimpanzee had received the Coke he had expected. (The chimp was a prominent member in the motley entourage of camp followers, many of comparable intelligence, that descended upon Dayton during the trial, in search of ready cash rather than eternal enlightenment.)
Robinson’s Drug Store, where it all began, moved to its present location in the late 1920s. PHOTO BY DEBORAH GOULD.
I was visiting Robinson’s Drug Store in June 1981, when a San Francisco paper called with a request for photos of modern Dayton. Sonny Robinson, who claims to be a shy man, began a flurry of calls to exploit the moment. Up north in the big town, you wouldn’t keep a man waiting, at least not without a request or an explanation: “Excuse me, I know you must be in a hurry, but would you mind, it won’t be more than a few minutes….” But it was 97° outside and cool in Sonny Robinson’s store. And where would a man be going anyway? Half an hour later, his personages assembled, Sonny Robinson pulled out the famous table and brought three Cokes in some old-fashioned five-cent glasses. I sat in the middle (“the biology professor from Harvard who just happened to walk in,” as Robinson had told his callers). On one side sat Ted Mercer, president of Bryan College, the fundamentalist school begun as a legacy to the “Great Commoner’s” last battle. On the other side sat Mr. Robinson, son of the man who had started it all around the same table fifty-six years before. The fundamentalist editor of the Dayton Herald snapped our pictures and we sipped our Cokes.
The interior of Robinson’s is covered with photos and other mementos of the Scopes trial. PHOTO BY DEBORAH GOULD.
Dayton has remained a small and inconspicuous town. If you’re coming from Knoxville via Decatur, you still have to cross the Tennessee River on a six-car ferry. The older houses are well kept, with four white pillars in front, the vernacular imitation of plantation style. (As a regional marker of the South, these pillars are architecture’s equivalent of the dependable gastronomical criterion: when the beverage simply labeled “tea” on the menu invariably comes iced.) H. L. Mencken, not known for words of praise, confessed (in surprise) his liking for Dayton:
A proper way to treat the issues that divide us. Three men of divergent views chat and sip Coke around the “original” table in Robinson’s Drug Store. Left, Ted Mercer, president of fundamentalist Bryan College; center, yours truly; right, Sonny Robinson. PHOTO BY DEBORAH GOULD.
I had expected to find a squalid Southern village…with pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty…. The houses are surrounded by pretty gardens, with cool green lawns and stately trees…. The stores carry good stocks and have a metropolitan air, especially the drug, book, magazine, sporting goods and soda-water emporium of the estimable Robinson.
The Rhea County Court House in Dayton, Tennessee, scene of the Scopes trial. PHOTO BY DEBORAH GOULD.
Some things have changed, of course. Trailers now rooted to their turf and houses of undressed concrete block reflect the doubling of Dayton’s population to nearly 4,000. The older certainties may have eroded somewhat. A banner headline in this week’s Dayton Herald tells of a $200-million marijuana crop confiscated and destroyed in Rhea and neighboring Bledsoe counties. And a quarter gets you a condom—“sold for the prevention of disease only,” of course—at vending machines in restrooms of local service stations. At least they can’t blame evolution for this, as one evangelical minister did a few months back when he cited Darwin as a primary supporter of the four “p’s”: prostitution, perversion, pornography, and permissiveness. They taught creationism in Dayton before John Scope
s arrived, and they teach it today.
For all these muted changes, Dayton remains a two-street town, dwarfed at the crossroad by the Rhea County courthouse, a Renaissance Revival building of the 1890s seemingly too large by half for a small town in a small county. Yet even this courtroom failed in its moment of glory, as Judge Raulston, noting that the weight of humanity had opened cracks in the ceiling below, reconvened his court on the side lawn, where Darrow grilled Bryan alfresco. (It is a meaningless and tangential irony to be sure, but I thought I’d mention it. Rhea was the daughter of Uranus and the mother of Zeus. Her name also applies to the South American “ostrich.” On the Beagle voyage, Darwin rediscovered a second species, the lesser, or Darwin’s, rhea, living in a different part of South America. In one of his first evolutionary speculations, Darwin surmised that the spatial difference between these two rheas might be analogous to the temporal distinction between extinct species and their living relatives.)
The Scopes trial is surrounded by misconceptions, and their exposure provides as good a way as any for recounting the basic story. In the heroic version, John Scopes was persecuted, Darrow rose to Scopes’s defense and smote the antediluvian Bryan, and the antievolution movement then dwindled or ground to at least a temporary halt. All three parts of this story are false.
For the first, we have already noted that Austin Peay and the legislators of Tennessee did not intend to enforce their law. In fact, Bryan himself had lobbied the legislature (unsuccessfully) with advice that the act prescribe no penalty for noncompliance. It was, after all, only a symbolic statement; any teeth in the act might lead to its upset on constitutional grounds. The ACLU advertised in Tennessee papers for a test case. George Rappelyea read their offer in the Chattanooga Times and moseyed on down to Robinson’s with his plan. Later, John Scopes remembered: “It was just a drugstore discussion that got past control.” For once, the tale of outside (even Yankee) agitators tells at least a half-truth.
Bryan was vanquished and embarrassed during the trial, but not primarily by Darrow. The trial itself, with its foregone conclusion, was something of a bore. (Scopes had violated the law and the defense wanted a quick conviction for an advantageous move to a higher court.) It dragged on in interminable legal wrangling and had only two moments of high drama. The first occurred during a legal argument about the admissibility of expert testimony. The defense had brought to Dayton an impressive array of men prominent both in evolutionary biology and Christian conviction. The prosecution urged that their testimony be excluded. The law plainly forbade the teaching of human evolution, and Scopes just as plainly had violated the law. The potential truth of evolution was not at issue. Judge Raulston agreed with the prosecution, and the assembled experts took to their typewriters instead. With benefit of a weekend recess to hone their statements, the experts produced some formidable documents. They were printed in newspapers throughout the country, and Judge Raulston finally did admit them into the printed record of the trial.
Bryan, who had sat in uncharacteristic silence for several days, used this procedural argument as a springboard for his prepared excoriation of evolution. In a grandiloquent speech clearly directed to his constituents (witnesses remarked that he stood with his back to the judge), Bryan virtually denied that humans were mammals and argued that the case of Messrs. Leopold and Loeb amply demonstrated that too much learning is a dangerous thing. The defense’s rebuttal provided Bryan’s first humiliation; for in this rural land, before the advent of television, no art commanded more respect than speechifying. And Bryan was just plain outspoken, outgestured, and outshouted—not by Darrow, but by another defense attorney, Dudley Field Malone, a prominent New York divorce lawyer and former subordinate to Bryan in the State Department (where Bryan had been secretary under Woodrow Wilson). H. L. Mencken wrote:
I doubt that any louder speech has ever been heard in a court of law since the days of Gog and Magog. It roared out of the open windows like the sound of artillery practice, and alarmed the moonshiners and catamounts on distant peaks…. In brief, Malone was in good voice. It was a great day for Ireland. And for the defense. For Malone not only out-yelled Bryan, he also plainly out-generaled and out-argued him…. It conquered even the fundamentalists. At its end they gave it a tremendous cheer—a cheer at least four times as hearty as that given to Bryan. For these rustics delight in speechifying, and know when it is good. The devil’s logic cannot fetch them, but they are not above taking a voluptuous pleasure in his lascivious phrases.
Nonetheless, Judge Raulston ruled against the defense and excluded expert testimony the next morning. It was Friday and all seemed over, including the shouting. Scopes would be convicted summarily on Monday morning; he had violated the law and Raulston’s narrow construction of the case had excluded all other issues. Virtually all the journalists, including H. L. Mencken, left town to avoid both the lull of a weekend recess and the expected anticlimax to follow. Thus, when Darrow induced Bryan to take the stand as an expert witness on the Bible, he spoke to a depleted local crowd and a skeleton crew of journalists. The reconstructions of Inherit the Wind and other accounts dramatize what was only an afterthought.
It is not even clear why Raulston allowed Bryan to appear (since he had excluded experts of opposite persuasion). The other prosecuting attorneys tried to dissuade Bryan, and Raulston finally expunged the entire exchange from the record. Bryan viewed the occasion as a desperate attempt to recover from Malone’s drubbing, but Darrow exposed him as a pompous fool. Still, the most famous moment of the exchange—when Bryan deserted strict fundamentalist tenets by admitting that the days of Genesis might have lasted far longer than twenty-four hours—was not, as legend has it, a reluctant admission drawn forth by Darrow’s ruthless logic. Bryan offered this statement freely, as an initial response to a series of questions. He did not seem to appreciate that local fundamentalists would regard it as a betrayal, and the surrounding world as a fatal inconsistency.
Scope’s conviction was eventually quashed on a technicality. Judge Raulston had set the fine of $100 himself, but Tennessee law required that all fines greater than $50 be recommended by the jury. With Bryan humiliated and the conviction quashed, the legend of victory for the defense arose, thus completing the heroic version. But the Scopes trial was a defeat (or a victory so Pyrrhic that it scarcely deserves the name) for several reasons. First, Bryan recouped by involuntarily taking the only option left for an immediate restoration of prestige: he died in Dayton a week after the trial ended. Ted Mercer’s Bryan College, a thriving fundamentalist institution in Dayton, is his local legacy. Second, the quashing of Scopes’s conviction was a bitter pill for the defense. Suddenly, there was no case left to appeal. All that effort down the tubes of a judge’s $50 error.
The Butler Act remained on the books until its repeal in 1967. It was not enforced, but who can tell how many teachers muted or suppressed their views and how many children never learned one of the most exciting and expansive ideas ever developed by scientists. In 1973, a “Genesis Bill” passed the senate of Tennessee, 69 to 16. It legislated equal time for evolution and creation and required a disclaimer in all texts that any stated idea about “the origin and creation of man and his world…is not represented to be scientific fact.” The Bible, however, was declared a reference work, not a text, and therefore exempt from the requirement for a printed disclaimer. This bill was declared unconstitutional a few years later.
Third, and sadly, any hope that the issues of Scopes’s trial had been banished to the realm of nostalgic Americana have been swept aside by our current creationist resurgence—the climate that inspired my own detour across the Tennessee River.
Late in his life, I came to know Kirtley Mather, emeritus professor of geology at Harvard, pillar of the Baptist church, lonely defender of academic freedom during the worst days of McCarthyism, and perhaps the finest man I have ever known. Kirtley was also a defense witness in Dayton. Each year, from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, Kirtley gave a lecture to my c
lass recalling his experiences at Dayton. It seemed a wonderful echo of times gone by, for Kirtley, in his late eighties, could still weave circles around the finest orators at Harvard. The lecture didn’t change much from year to year. I viewed it first as a charming evocation, later as mildly related to current affairs, finally as a vital statement of pressing realities. This year, I will dust off the videotape and show it to my class as a disquisition on immediate dangers.
In 1965, John Scopes permitted himself this hope in retrospect:
I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism…. I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past, that religion and science may now address one another in an atmosphere of mutual respect and of a common quest for truth. I like to think that the Dayton trial had some part in bringing to birth this new era.
(Scopes, by the way, later went to the University of Chicago and became a geologist. He lived quietly in Shreveport, Louisiana, for most of his life, working, as do so many geologists, for the petroleum industry. This splendid man of quiet integrity refused to capitalize on his transient and accidental fame in any way. His silence betokened no crisis of confidence or any departure from the principles that led to his momentary renown. He simply chose to make his own way on his own merits.)
Today, Jerry Falwell has donned Bryan’s mantle, and Scopes’s hopes for a “new era” have been thwarted. Of course, we will not replay Scopes’s drama in exactly the same way; we have advanced somewhere in fifty-six years. Evolution is now too strong to exclude entirely, and current proposals for legislation mandate “equal time” for evolution and for old-time religion masquerading under the self-contradictory title of “scientific creationism.” But the similarities between 1925 and 1981 are more disconcerting than the differences are comforting.
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