March 17, 2025: ScopesStudying: The Butler Act

[100 years ago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler Act, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous trial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on educators.]

For the law’s 100^th anniversary, on three interesting historical ironies around it.

1)      John Washington Butler’s Beliefs: The state representative who introduced the Act (and for whom it was nicknamed thereafter) was mostly known as a farmer, but had worked as a teacher as a young man. That’s an interesting detail, but the irony I want to highlight is that, by his own admission, Butler had no knowledge of evolution when he introduced the bill. As he noted, “No, I didn’t know anything about evolution when I introduced it. I’d read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense.” Perhaps it not an irony so much as a very telling, and frustratingly American, detail that the author of the nation’s most famous anti-evolution educational law was poorly educated about evolution.

2)      Austin Peay’s Advocacy: Butler’s bill passed the Tennessee House in January 1925 and the Tennessee Senate in March, and then was signed into law on March 21 by Governor Austin Peay. Peay, was serving the first of what would be three terms as Governor (he tragically died in office in October 1927), was an influential political figure in the state on multiple levels (he was ranked the state’s best governor by historians in a 1981 poll, for example). But the irony here is that the most significant level seems to have been his educational reforms—when he took office the state’s education system was worst in the country by several measures, and he worked to change that, building new schools, lengthening the school year, increasing teacher pay and benefits, and more. Guess those pro-teacher policies didn’t extend to academic freedom, though.

3)      An Overdue, Immediate Repeal: The famous trial about which I’ll have much more to say this week was the Act’s most prominent as well as immediate legacy—but the law stayed on the books for more than four decades, greatly influencing generations of Tennessee schoolkids (and thus the entire state) in the process. The irony, though, is how suddenly that changed—when teacher Gary Scott, who had been fired for violating the Act, successfully sued for reinstatement under the First Amendment, it took just three days for both legislative houses to pass (and Governor Buford Ellington to sign) a bill repealing the Butler Act. A state legislature acting swiftly and decisively to do away with an outdated, prejudiced law and help the state move forward into a more progressive future? Not just ironic but, here in 2025, ideal.

Next Scopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?