Trial of the century: Why 100 years later, the Scopes case still matters

USA Today

11-07-2025

DAYTON, TN – Inside a sweltering courtroom in July, a fierce debate was underway here in this small Tennessee town.
Modern science versus religion and the battle over what is taught inside America's public schools and how.
The legal titans squared off against each other: A former member of Congress and three-time presidential candidate up against one of the most prominent defense attorneys of his day.
They sparred over science and the Bible. They tried to match wits. One even argued to the death.
It was, no doubt, the trial of the century.
Now, 100 years after what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial in July 1925, the nation once again is fiercely debating what America's children are taught and how – from race and LGBTQ+ books to major pushes to put religion back into public school classrooms.
'Scopes was the first-ever battle in the culture wars,' said Edward Larson, a historian and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'Summer For the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.'
'We may not be fighting about creation and evolution now, but the larger battles still continue.'
How the case became the 'trial of the century'
In March 1925, Tennessee became the first state in the country to ban the teaching of evolution amid the quickly-evolving early 20th century social landscape with the passage of the Butler Act.
The law made it a misdemeanor punishable by fine 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 American Civil Liberties Union, which was then just a baby organization, got wind of (the law) and decided this was a fight they wanted to pick,' said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education and leading advocate for secular science education. 'So they sent letters to Tennessee newspapers saying that they were looking for a teacher who would be willing to be a defendant in the test case of the Butler Act.
In Dayton, Tennessee, George Rappleyea, a local businessman, saw the ads and hatched a plan.
He convinced the young John Scopes, a Dayton biology teacher and football coach, to be the test case.
Scopes was a rather willing participant. He was a University of Kentucky graduate and had watched his professors rally to defeat a similar bill that had gone before Kentucky legislators in 1922.
After Rappleyea arranged to have Scopes arrested for admitting to teaching evolution — something he likely never actually did, according to numerous historians — William Jennings Bryan, a staunch Christian anti-evolutionist, former U.S. House member, secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson and a three-time Democratic presidential candidate, agreed to serve as the prosecutor.
Clarence Darrow, who was an avowed agnostic and impassioned labor lawyer, joined the ACLU in Scopes' defense.
The trial that followed was heated. Spectators swarmed in from around the country to see the legendary lawyers battle over creationism, evolution and the role of religion in government.
The courtroom was so overcrowded at one point that town officials warned the building might collapse, prompting the judge to set up a temporary court outside to appease the masses.
Audiences across the country tuned in to the trial as well, both through radio and newspaper. The trial was the first to be broadcast live on radio in American history, with Chicago's WGN Radio spending $1,000 a day — equivalent to over $18,000 a day in today's economy — to run cables from Chicago, Illinois to Dayton, Tennessee to provide live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the "trial of the century."
Famous journalist and commentator Henry Louis 'H.L.' Mencken, who wrote for the Baltimore Sun at the time of the trial, wrote daily columns for the paper covering the ordeal and famously dubbed the proceedings as "The Monkey Trial.'
The expansive audience placed pressure on the lawyers. After facing significant roadblocks in his defense, Darrow changed tactics and called Bryan to the stand in an attempt to prove Bryan's literal interpretation of the Bible was unfit to base laws on.
'Bryan had a lot of difficulty with (Darrow's questions), and many of them were not very subtle or sophisticated questions,' Branch said. 'One of the questions that Darrow asked was 'Where did Cain, the second son of Adam and Eve, find his wife?' And Bryan had no kind of answer for this. He said 'I leave the atheist to look for her.''
The grueling examination left Bryan scrambling and humiliated.
'Darrow was quite relentless, and in many people's opinion, especially the big city reporters, Bryan came across not only as ignorant, but as complacent about his ignorance,' Branch said.
In Darrow's closing arguments, he asked the jury to return a guilty verdict so he could try the case on appeal — where he would have more room to argue the law itself was unconstitutional. And in a clever legal maneuver, Darrow denied Bryan the chance to give his own closing argument that he had been anticipating for weeks.
After only nine minutes of deliberation, the jury returned the desired guilty verdict. And while Scopes got away with paying a $100 fine, about $1,800 in today's dollars, Bryan left the court disgraced. He died just five days later on a Sunday afternoon − in Dayton.
Darrow's plan worked. At least in the end. In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Scopes trial verdict on a technicality, though it did not touch the law itself.
Then in 1967, another lawsuit by a Tennessee teacher finally led state lawmakers to repeal the Butler Act.
One year later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar anti-evolution Arkansas law on the basis that it violated the establishment clause in the First Amendment, forever stamping anti-evolution laws in the country as unconstitutional.
A century later, how the Scopes trial still resonates
The Scopes trial put the town of Dayton, Tennessee on the map and thrust the separation of church and state to the forefront. A century later, the nation is still debating similar issues with cases again going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
'I've always looked at the Scopes trial as an early skirmish in the public school-based culture wars that became so prominent in the decades that followed,' said Rob Boston, senior adviser at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. 'It was like a robin in spring. You see the robin in your yard, and you know that spring is on the way — a harbinger for things to come.'
At a speech during a centennial celebration dinner in Dayton, Tennessee in March, Larson spoke about a conversation he had with a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
"He told me that (when he thinks) about it, he can't help but compare the Scopes trial to the laws and policies of today that attempt to regulate controversial topics, like education, gender rights, book bans in schools, etc.," Larson said. "So many issues still boil down to science versus culture."
"The Scopes trial shows us that criminal justice is not just about enforcing laws, but also about negotiating societal values within a legal framework."
In Tennessee, conservative lawmakers never stopped pushing legislation to strengthen certain Christian values in classrooms: from recent laws restricting access to books deemed immoral and requirements to teach anti-abortion materials supported by faith-based groups to laws attempting to allow the placement of the Ten Commandments in public schools and the hiring of grade-school chaplains.
In Texas, recent state curriculum has brought pushback for its inclusion of Genesis and creation-focused lessons for K-5 students.
In West Virginia, lawmakers passed a bill in 2024 that allowed school teachers to discuss 'theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist,' in a move many critics say was a thinly veiled attempt to allow creationism into public schools.
In Oklahoma, the state Supreme Court blocked an attempt by the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and the Oklahoma State Department of Education in March to spend tax dollars on Bibles and biblical curriculum in public schools.
In a news release from the Oklahoma State Department of Education originally announcing the intent to buy the Bibles in December 2024, Walters defended the decision as the best way to educate children on the nation's history.
"Oklahoma is putting the Bible and the historical impact of Christianity back in school," Walter said. "We are demanding that our children learn the full and true context of our nation's founding and of the principles that made and continue to make America great and exceptional."
Then just in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a group of Maryland parents had a right to opt their children out of public school instruction that included LGBTQ+ themes, citing the parents' First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.
In the end, Larson said that even 100 years later, Americans can relate to what took place in Dayton.
'To me, if you ask me what the trial is: I think it is a ripping good story involving people who are larger than life, but featuring people and issues you can relate too," Larson said.
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