[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.]
On three
interesting facts about the Tennessee
science teacher and football coach who became the center of one of America’s
most
famous trials.
1)
Innocence?: I think it’s become relatively
well known (at least compared to many historical realities) that Scopes was
recruited (by geologist
George Rappleyea and other scientists and businessmen in the town of Dayton
where Scopes taught) to stand trial for violating the Butler Act. But what I
didn’t realize until researching this series was that even by the letter of
that restrictive law, Scopes might have been innocent—it’s true that the textbook
he and all state biology teachers in that era were required to use, George
William Hunter’s Civic Biology, included a chapter on evolution; but
Scopes later admitted
to local reporter William Kinsey Hutchinson that he had omitted that
chapter from his lessons. Hutchinson didn’t publish his story until after the
trial’s verdict, or perhaps this famous trial would have ended differently.
2)
A Socialist Campaign: In any case, Scopes was
found guilty on July 21, 1925, and his conviction was upheld
by the Tennessee Supreme Court a year later (although they vacated his $100
fine because the judge, rather than the jury, had determined the amount). The
trial and verdict would linger with Scopes for the rest of his life, only
becoming somewhat more of a positive presence decades later as I’ll highlight below.
But of course they’re not the whole story, and one distinct and particularly
interesting detail is that in
1932 he ran an at-large campaign for a U.S. House of Representatives seat
from Kentucky (his childhood home, to which he and his family had relocated
after the trial) as a
Socialist Party candidate. Probably wouldn’t help his case with
conservative Tennessee neighbors if they knew that fact, but it makes clear
that he wasn’t just recruited or forced into political conversations.
3)
A Late-Life Embrace: Again, for a long time
Scopes saw the trial and verdict as an albatross, but in the decade before his
1970 death he began to change his perspective. That shift is particularly clear
in a trio of 1960 events: attending the July U.S. premiere of the film
Inherit the Wind (on which more in Thursday’s post), telling the story
of the trial on an October
episode of the TV game show To Tell the Truth, and taking part in that
year’s celebrations of John
T. Scopes Day in Dayton. Scopes would lean into those associations with the
trial for the rest of his life, culminating in his emphasis on that story in
his 1967 autobiography Center of the Storm: Memoirs
of John T. Scopes—the first edition of which, as you can see at that
hyperlink, features a monkey on the cover, natch.
Next
Scopes context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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