Latest news with #ScopesMonkeyTrial
Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Prime Video fans are bingeing 'high stakes' courtroom drama that makes them 'trust no one'
All eight episodes are available to stream on Prime Video Prime Video fans are binge watching a high stakes court drama that makes them "trust no-one". Justice on Trial is a gripping new series from judicial icon Judge Judy Sheindlin. Premiering on July 21, fans have already binge watched the show, which sees Judge Judy Sheindlin putting the justice system on trial. With eight episodes, fans have branded it a must watch for fans of true crime. Judge Sheindlin herself said of the show: "Judges do not make law. They interpret the law. Judges are people. Sometimes they get it wrong. Then what happens? "When and how long will it take to get it right? I've put justice on trial. I couldn't be more proud of this series. Everybody who watches it will come away a little smarter. Mission accomplished." The judge will visit one of the most personal and complex cases of her career, a diplomatic immunity battle, as well as recreating the chilling case of Archie Dixon, who confessed to murdering his roommate and burying him alive. A Prime Video synopsis reads: "Judge Judy Sheindlin puts the American justice system on trial in a true crime high-stakes courtroom drama, as she and her expert legal team recreate the trials from notorious cases where following the letter of the law did not necessarily feel 'just.' "Season 1 spans from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to a case in which the convicted killer is currently on Death Row." And the series has been a hit with fans already. One fan wrote: "Justice on trial is really good, this is just the first episode I'm on, very compelling." Another added: "Check out the show #JusticeOnTrial on @PrimeVideo it's a great show." While a different viewer commented: "Justice on trial is really good, this is just the first episode I'm on, very compelling." Elsewhere, another show watcher put: "I enjoyed this show. It is a nice change from civil suits" while a different account put: "This case had my mouth dropping open! We immediately watched the next one!!"
USA Today
12-07-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
100 years after the Scopes trial, Americans are still divided over what kids should learn
A century ago, a Tennessee science teacher's fight to teach evolution ignited national controversy. But battles over school curricula still rage. In 1925, an American teacher's fight to educate his high school students about evolution thrust a small-town controversy into the national spotlight. The case, now commonly known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, began when John Thomas Scopes taught Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in his classroom in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes was charged under a state law that made it illegal to teach any doctrine that denied the creation of man as told in the Bible. The case ultimately reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, which upheld the law but acquitted Scopes on a technicality. In the century since, debates over what kids should learn in taxpayer-supported schools – and the role parents should play in shaping those decisions – have only intensified. This summer, those fights reached another crescendo when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that religious parents can opt their public-school children out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes. But the curriculum wars have been intensifying for decades. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement forced schools to start to reckon with decades of racist teachings and practices. The 1990s brought passionate fights over classroom standards. With the 2000s, came major tech innovations, from iPhones to YouTube, that raised new questions about whether those technologies had a place in the classroom. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Many parents tried, and failed, to keep their kids from falling behind as schools closed. Meanwhile, anger toward the educational establishment among conservative parents grew into a full-fledged movement to exert more parental control in classrooms. "The longer classrooms remained closed, the more disenfranchised parents felt," said Sarah Parshall Perry, the vice president of the conservative group Defending Education and a former Education Department attorney in the first Trump administration. "The parental right does not end at the schoolhouse door," she said. One hundred years after the Scopes trial, the concept of parental rights continues to fuel curriculum battles – from book bans to LGBTQ+ censorship – in school boards and state legislatures nationwide. Teaching about race across America The debate over how American history, and its history with race in particular, should be taught in public schools intensified in a new way with the Scopes trial, said Adam Laats, a professor at Binghamton University who studies historical battles over education culture. The trial was the beginning of a "100-year war over controlling public schools," he said. "It's not just a question of evolutionary teaching," he said. "It's much bigger than that." Fast forward to 2020, when another national spotlight was cast on racial inequities following the high-profile killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In Taylor's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, the local school superintendent, Marty Pollio, recalled being asked by state politicians for details regarding his district's racial equity policy, which had been in place for years before her killing. "We were being praised," Pollio said. But a year later, a nearly identical group of politicians questioned him over the alleged teaching of critical race theory in his schools. Critical race theory, or CRT, is a framework of legal analysis based on the idea that systemic racism is deeply embedded within American society. It is typically taught in U.S. law schools and colleges, not K-12 schools. On the national stage, those criticisms about CRT have widened in recent years into broader concerns among Republicans about the role of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs in schools. DEI, a term that isn't always clearly defined, broadly refers to policies or programs that schools implement to prevent discrimination and create welcoming environments. In April, President Donald Trump's administration warned school districts that they could risk losing federal funding if they don't get rid of their DEI programs. Though that threat has been halted by a court battle, Pollio said it was an indication that much of the progress he felt was happening in 2020 is long gone. "I was really proud of the momentum that was happening in education at that time," he said. "But I'm really disappointed in how it's been abandoned at this point." Book bans on the rise Backed by conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty, efforts to control what books are on the shelves of classrooms and school libraries have also accelerated since the pandemic. Free speech advocacy group PEN America said over 10,000 books were banned in public schools in the 2023-24 school year, nearly tripling the previous year's number. The most common themes in the removed books include race, sexuality and gender identity, along with topics involving struggles with substance abuse, suicide, depression and other mental health issues, according to PEN America. In Tennessee, a state law passed in 2023 heightened tensions over what books are appropriate for young children. In 2024, at least 1,155 unique titles were pulled from the shelves or heavily age-restricted in Tennessee's public schools, according to The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. State funds for private and religious schools Another frontier in the modern-day battle over public schooling has less to do with what should be taught in the classroom, and more to do with another controversial question: Which schools should get taxpayer money? An increasing number of states are adopting programs that give families taxpayer-funded vouchers to offset private K-12 school tuition – including at religious schools. While vouchers may not be a direct part of deciding what's taught in public schools, they do reflect the larger conversation around how states handle public education. A major development in the debate on state-funded education is playing out in Oklahoma. In April, justices on the U.S. Supreme Court seemed sympathetic to a bid from the state's charter school board to create the first religious charter school in the U.S. But the court ultimately deadlocked 4-4 in the case, meaning the religious charter school would remain blocked. Greenlighting the school would have marked a major expansion of the use of taxpayer money for religious education. LGBTQ+ inclusion Legislatures in red states have pushed in recent years to censor teaching about LGBTQ+ history and culture in classrooms. It comes in the context of a broader movement in the U.S. to curb the rights of queer and transgender people. That campaign largely started in 2022 in Florida, where the Parental Rights in Education Act, a controversial measure dubbed by critics as the "Don't Say Gay" bill, was passed by the GOP-controlled legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The law prohibited classroom instruction on topics relating to sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. A year later, the Florida state education board expanded the ban through 12th grade. The law's initial ambiguity created a "chilling effect" that inspired conservative politicians in states across the country to pursue similarly written measures, said Brian Dittmeier, the director of public policy at GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. "The vagueness of some of these policies is the point," he said. Since 2022, 11 states have adopted laws restricting discussions about LGBTQ+ people or issues in school curricula, according to a 2024 tally from the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank. A court settlement eventually watered down the impact of Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law by allowing teachers and students to still discuss topics relating to the LGBTQ+ community. For advocates like Quinn Diaz, a public policy associate at the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, the settlement was a big deal. It showed – much like the Scopes trial, Diaz said – how legal fights can ultimately help protect students and teachers. "The settlement remains a symbol of hope," they said. Three years, almost to the day, after the so-called "Don't Say Gay" law took effect, the pendulum swung in the other direction. The Supreme Court allowed parents nationwide to prevent their kids from reading LGBTQ+ books in school.
USA Today
11-07-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Trial of the century: Why 100 years later, the Scopes case still matters
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. The USA TODAY Network - Tennessee's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Have a story to tell? Reach Angele Latham by email at alatham@ by phone at 931-623-9485, or follow her on Twitter at @angele_latham
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘What should be taught in schools?': the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial' turns 100
Her great-grandfather was a doctor called to attend to the lawyer who put the case for creationism. Her great-grandmother was related to Charles Darwin. And now she works in the courthouse where the 'trial of the century' – in which a high school teacher was accused of illegally teaching evolution – began exactly a century ago on Thursday. No one has a perspective on the 'Scopes monkey trial' quite like Pat Guffey, a former high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. As the city prepares to mark the centenary with a week-long festival including a dramatic re-enactment of the court battle, she is aware how its legacy proved both a blessing and a curse. 'So many people have the idea that we are uneducated, we can't speak correctly, we can't write a sentence correctly, we walk down the street barefoot with tattered clothes,' says Guffey, now 79 and the Rhea county historian. 'We are hillbillies, maybe, we have a hickey accent, maybe, but still, everybody talks their own way.' Guffey was a teenager when Dayton hosted the premiere of Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, a classic Hollywood account of the trial that immortalised the town as 'the buckle of the Bible belt'. She recalls: 'That was the biggest blunder. Oh, mercy! That was horrible.' One hundred years later the jurists, journalists and onlookers who crowded into the courtroom on sweltering summer days have passed into history. But the Scopes monkey trial continues to rhyme with the book bans, Christian fundamentalism and challenges to scientific expertise amid today's cultural and religious divides. Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, says the trial touches 'everything from the constitutional issues to civil liberties issues but also even civil rights issues about what you can read or think or censor. What should be taught in schools? Who should decide that? And even beyond that, the kind of anxiety that just the word science seems to trigger in people'. It was March 1925 when the Tennessee state legislature passed a law that made it illegal 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 (ACLU) in New York decided to challenge its violation of the separation of church and state as unconstitutional. The ACLU took out an advert in the Chattanooga Daily Times newspaper offering to defend any teacher prosecuted under the law. Business leaders in Dayton, then a town of just 1,800 people located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, scented a PR coup. They recruited 24-year-old John Scopes, a local sports coach and first-year teacher, to stand as defendant in the test case, even though he said he did not remember teaching Darwin's theory. He was arrested on 7 May 1925 and charged with teaching the theory of evolution. The plan worked and the media circus came to town. Dayton had to build a new airstrip to deal with the influx of 200 reporters and a new telegraph office for the more than 2m words they would transmit. It would be the first trial broadcast live on radio, presaging OJ Simpson, Oscar Pistorius and all the blockbuster cases that would follow. The defence was led by Clarence Darrow, 68, a nationally renowned lawyer who argued that the Tennessee law was unconstitutional because it made the Bible, a religious document, the standard of truth in a public institution. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, 65, a former secretary of state and presidential candidate who was the most famous fundamentalist Christian spokesperson in the country. The acerbic journalist HL Mencken, who dubbed it the 'monkey trial', wrote of Bryan: 'He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. 'Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.' This was the Jim Crow era and Tennessee was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, wrote that if Darwin was right about evolution, white people would 'have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise'. But the judge excluded testimony from scientific experts. Darrow fought back by calling Bryan himself to testify as an expert on the Bible, posing questions such as where did Cain get his wife, how many people were on Earth 3,000 years ago and how many languages are there? As tempers frayed, the judge intervened and called an adjournment for the day. The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion, however. The jury deliberated for nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. In January 1927 the Tennessee supreme court overturned the conviction because the judge – not the jury – had set the fine, though the court also upheld the law's constitutionality. Bryan was still in town when he died five days after the trial ended. A nextdoor neighbour called Mr Andrews went to fetch Guffey's great-grandfather, Dr Walter Thomason, in an effort to revive him. She says: 'He was already dead at the time, before they had gotten there even. He had died in his sleep. My great-grandfather signed the death certificate.' She adds: 'Mr Andrews liked what they called a hot toddy and so he told my great grandfather, 'Doc, do you think it would be good to give him a hot toddy?' My grandfather said, 'No, he's already dead.' But Mrs Bryan heard that and said, 'No liquor has ever touched his lips; nor will any do so now.'' Guffey also points out that Thomason's wife, her great-grandmother, was a Darwin. 'We have traced our our lineage back to Charles Darwin. It's not real close but it is traced back to him.' The state law against teaching evolution remained on the books until 1967. Guffey, who went to school in Dayton, recalls: 'It was just gone over, like you turn a page and nothing was said about it. Most of the biology teachers then were coaches so they were very interested in doing football plays and giving us worksheets. We did do some dissection but very little, so there wasn't a whole lot going on.' When Guffey became a biology teacher herself, working from 1983 to 2011, the religion versus science debate that played out in court still cast a shadow. 'I always tried to give my students both points of view and tell them what both meant but some of them didn't want to get into that. They didn't want to explain evolution because they didn't even want to talk about it.' Guffey now works at the Rhea County Historical Society, which is based in the original courthouse, a designated national historic landmark that includes a museum. The court offices moved to a new building a few years ago. Dayton will mark the centenary from 11 to 19 July with a festival that includes a symposium on the trial and activities on the courthouse lawn and around town. The star attraction is the long-running play Destiny in Dayton, adapted in 1988 from the transcript of the trial and performed in the original courtroom. Tom Davis, 74, one of the festival organisers, says: 'We have people of all persuasions in the cast. It's not that you have to be a creationist or an evolutionist to be in this. We're just looking for actors who are willing to do a sincere job. I'm not in the production itself but I know the cast regularly gets together after rehearsals, go over to one of the local restaurants and sit and talk about all sorts of stuff, including these issues.' Destiny in Dayton the city's quiet way of pushing back at the mythology of Inherit the Wind, a play that continues to be regularly revived – a new production opens at Washington's Arena Stage next year. Co-authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee changed the name of Dayton to Hillsboro and intended their work, like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, to make a coded critique of McCarthyism. The movie version continues to endure with indelible performances by Spencer Tracy and Fredric March as the duelling lawyers. Gene Kelly plays a cynical big city newsman, inspired by Mencken, who remarks: 'I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread.' Davis reflects: 'Hillsboro was full of bigots and ignoramuses like Mencken described: people who were afraid of education. That wasn't Dayton. In 1927, two years after the trial, some of the same folk who planned or participated in the trial opened the first public school. A bunch of the same people worked to establish Bryan College. It's not that people were against education.' Davis, who moved to Dayton in 1976, is vice-president of Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation and finds the trial is still relevant to America in the present. 'When you look at various public outcries, so many of them have a tie to the trial,' he explains. 'Public education – you can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing some reference to parents are upset about this or want to do that in public schools and fighting with school boards and so on. That was at the heart of the trial. Who has the right to set the agenda for public schools? Is it the professionals or is it the parents who pay for them?' He adds: 'You look at the idea of majority and minority rights. Who sets the agenda for what happens in America these days? Is it the majority? We claim to be a democracy. To most people, democracy means he who gets the most votes wins. That's all well and good but where does that leave the folk in the minority? Do they have any rights? All of this is critical to where we are as a nation.' Opponents of evolution have adapted their strategies over time, seeking to bypass legal challenges by reframing their arguments. 'Scientific creationism' in the 1970s and early 1980s aimed to secure equal time in public schools for what they presented as a scientific alternative to evolution. 'Intelligent design' in 1990s and early 2000s also sought to present itself as a scientific theory challenging evolution. But judges ruled that these anti-evolutionary concepts were religious, not scientific, and therefore their inclusion in science classrooms violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. Nothing, however, has matched the Scopes trial for drama, spectacle and legend. Edward Larson, a professor of history and law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, says: 'The trial survives but it survives as a myth and under the myth both sides are victims. 'Science, universities, culture, education is a victim of the mob; the people, religion, culture are a victim of the elites. We see that playing out today even in the battles over the universities and the battles over science that are happening in America. But it's not just the United States.'
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘What should be taught in schools?': the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial' turns 100
Her great-grandfather was a doctor called to attend to the lawyer who put the case for creationism. Her great-grandmother was related to Charles Darwin. And now she works in the courthouse where the 'trial of the century' – in which a high school teacher was accused of illegally teaching evolution – began exactly a century ago on Thursday. No one has a perspective on the 'Scopes monkey trial' quite like Pat Guffey, a former high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. As the city prepares to mark the centenary with a week-long festival including a dramatic re-enactment of the court battle, she is aware how its legacy proved both a blessing and a curse. 'So many people have the idea that we are uneducated, we can't speak correctly, we can't write a sentence correctly, we walk down the street barefoot with tattered clothes,' says Guffey, now 79 and the Rhea county historian. 'We are hillbillies, maybe, we have a hickey accent, maybe, but still, everybody talks their own way.' Guffey was a teenager when Dayton hosted the premiere of Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, a classic Hollywood account of the trial that immortalised the town as 'the buckle of the Bible belt'. She recalls: 'That was the biggest blunder. Oh, mercy! That was horrible.' One hundred years later the jurists, journalists and onlookers who crowded into the courtroom on sweltering summer days have passed into history. But the Scopes monkey trial continues to rhyme with the book bans, Christian fundamentalism and challenges to scientific expertise amid today's cultural and religious divides. Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, says the trial touches 'everything from the constitutional issues to civil liberties issues but also even civil rights issues about what you can read or think or censor. What should be taught in schools? Who should decide that? And even beyond that, the kind of anxiety that just the word science seems to trigger in people'. It was March 1925 when the Tennessee state legislature passed a law that made it illegal 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 (ACLU) in New York decided to challenge its violation of the separation of church and state as unconstitutional. The ACLU took out an advert in the Chattanooga Daily Times newspaper offering to defend any teacher prosecuted under the law. Business leaders in Dayton, then a town of just 1,800 people located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, scented a PR coup. They recruited 24-year-old John Scopes, a local sports coach and first-year teacher, to stand as defendant in the test case, even though he said he did not remember teaching Darwin's theory. He was arrested on 7 May 1925 and charged with teaching the theory of evolution. The plan worked and the media circus came to town. Dayton had to build a new airstrip to deal with the influx of 200 reporters and a new telegraph office for the more than 2m words they would transmit. It would be the first trial broadcast live on radio, presaging OJ Simpson, Oscar Pistorius and all the blockbuster cases that would follow. The defence was led by Clarence Darrow, 68, a nationally renowned lawyer who argued that the Tennessee law was unconstitutional because it made the Bible, a religious document, the standard of truth in a public institution. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, 65, a former secretary of state and presidential candidate who was the most famous fundamentalist Christian spokesperson in the country. The acerbic journalist HL Mencken, who dubbed it the 'monkey trial', wrote of Bryan: 'He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. 'Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.' This was the Jim Crow era and Tennessee was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, wrote that if Darwin was right about evolution, white people would 'have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise'. But the judge excluded testimony from scientific experts. Darrow fought back by calling Bryan himself to testify as an expert on the Bible, posing questions such as where did Cain get his wife, how many people were on Earth 3,000 years ago and how many languages are there? As tempers frayed, the judge intervened and called an adjournment for the day. The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion, however. The jury deliberated for nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. In January 1927 the Tennessee supreme court overturned the conviction because the judge – not the jury – had set the fine, though the court also upheld the law's constitutionality. Bryan was still in town when he died five days after the trial ended. A nextdoor neighbour called Mr Andrews went to fetch Guffey's great-grandfather, Dr Walter Thomason, in an effort to revive him. She says: 'He was already dead at the time, before they had gotten there even. He had died in his sleep. My great-grandfather signed the death certificate.' She adds: 'Mr Andrews liked what they called a hot toddy and so he told my great grandfather, 'Doc, do you think it would be good to give him a hot toddy?' My grandfather said, 'No, he's already dead.' But Mrs Bryan heard that and said, 'No liquor has ever touched his lips; nor will any do so now.'' Guffey also points out that Thomason's wife, her great-grandmother, was a Darwin. 'We have traced our our lineage back to Charles Darwin. It's not real close but it is traced back to him.' The state law against teaching evolution remained on the books until 1967. Guffey, who went to school in Dayton, recalls: 'It was just gone over, like you turn a page and nothing was said about it. Most of the biology teachers then were coaches so they were very interested in doing football plays and giving us worksheets. We did do some dissection but very little, so there wasn't a whole lot going on.' When Guffey became a biology teacher herself, working from 1983 to 2011, the religion versus science debate that played out in court still cast a shadow. 'I always tried to give my students both points of view and tell them what both meant but some of them didn't want to get into that. They didn't want to explain evolution because they didn't even want to talk about it.' Guffey now works at the Rhea County Historical Society, which is based in the original courthouse, a designated national historic landmark that includes a museum. The court offices moved to a new building a few years ago. Dayton will mark the centenary from 11 to 19 July with a festival that includes a symposium on the trial and activities on the courthouse lawn and around town. The star attraction is the long-running play Destiny in Dayton, adapted in 1988 from the transcript of the trial and performed in the original courtroom. Tom Davis, 74, one of the festival organisers, says: 'We have people of all persuasions in the cast. It's not that you have to be a creationist or an evolutionist to be in this. We're just looking for actors who are willing to do a sincere job. I'm not in the production itself but I know the cast regularly gets together after rehearsals, go over to one of the local restaurants and sit and talk about all sorts of stuff, including these issues.' Destiny in Dayton the city's quiet way of pushing back at the mythology of Inherit the Wind, a play that continues to be regularly revived – a new production opens at Washington's Arena Stage next year. Co-authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee changed the name of Dayton to Hillsboro and intended their work, like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, to make a coded critique of McCarthyism. The movie version continues to endure with indelible performances by Spencer Tracy and Fredric March as the duelling lawyers. Gene Kelly plays a cynical big city newsman, inspired by Mencken, who remarks: 'I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread.' Davis reflects: 'Hillsboro was full of bigots and ignoramuses like Mencken described: people who were afraid of education. That wasn't Dayton. In 1927, two years after the trial, some of the same folk who planned or participated in the trial opened the first public school. A bunch of the same people worked to establish Bryan College. It's not that people were against education.' Davis, who moved to Dayton in 1976, is vice-president of Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation and finds the trial is still relevant to America in the present. 'When you look at various public outcries, so many of them have a tie to the trial,' he explains. 'Public education – you can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing some reference to parents are upset about this or want to do that in public schools and fighting with school boards and so on. That was at the heart of the trial. Who has the right to set the agenda for public schools? Is it the professionals or is it the parents who pay for them?' He adds: 'You look at the idea of majority and minority rights. Who sets the agenda for what happens in America these days? Is it the majority? We claim to be a democracy. To most people, democracy means he who gets the most votes wins. That's all well and good but where does that leave the folk in the minority? Do they have any rights? All of this is critical to where we are as a nation.' Opponents of evolution have adapted their strategies over time, seeking to bypass legal challenges by reframing their arguments. 'Scientific creationism' in the 1970s and early 1980s aimed to secure equal time in public schools for what they presented as a scientific alternative to evolution. 'Intelligent design' in 1990s and early 2000s also sought to present itself as a scientific theory challenging evolution. But judges ruled that these anti-evolutionary concepts were religious, not scientific, and therefore their inclusion in science classrooms violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. Nothing, however, has matched the Scopes trial for drama, spectacle and legend. Edward Larson, a professor of history and law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, says: 'The trial survives but it survives as a myth and under the myth both sides are victims. 'Science, universities, culture, education is a victim of the mob; the people, religion, culture are a victim of the elites. We see that playing out today even in the battles over the universities and the battles over science that are happening in America. But it's not just the United States.'
