Christian History Magazine Collection

The first trial of the century revealed a great divide separating American Christians.

by David Goetz from Christian History magazine no. 55

The court will come to order,” said the Honorable John T. Raulston. “The Reverend Cartwright will please open the court with prayer.”

It was Friday, July 10, 1925, 9 A.M., in Dayton, Tennessee, a small mountain community of about 2,000. It was the State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes, the first American trial to be nationally broadcast on radio.

It should have been an open-and-shut case: did a high school mathematics-turned-biology teacher teach evolution in class? If yes, Scopes was guilty of violating a new Tennessee law.

But the case ballooned into one of the great media events of the twentieth century. Like the O. J. Simpson trial in our day, the case itself set no significant precedents, but it revealed a widening chasm in America, and in American Christianity.

Media circus

In January, about six months prior to the “monkey trial” (as it came to be known), the lower house of the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler bill:

“It shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals, and all other public schools 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.” Any teacher found guilty of the misdemeanor would be fined between $100 and $500.

The bill created a national buzz, and immediately the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) advertised to pay the costs to test the statute in court. A mining engineer in Dayton, Tennessee, George W. Rappelyea, convinced John Scopes to admit to violating the statute to become a test case.

When nationally known Clarence Darrow joined the defense team and William Jennings Bryan, the prosecution, the made-for-radio trial was set.

Both men were in the twilight of their careers. Almost 70 years old, Darrow had just come off a highly publicized trial in Chicago, in which he saved two admitted murderers (Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb) from capital punishment with an insanity defense. Darrow was widely known as a defender of “radicals” and an outspoken agnostic.

Bryan had been a three-time presidential candidate and secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. Though he had not practiced law in more than 30 years, he was the author of a syndicated weekly column on the Bible and was recognized as a leading spokesman for emerging fundamentalism.

When the trial began, more than 100 journalists—including sardonic H. L. Mencken—descended on tiny Dayton. The press had its angle from the outset. To them Darrow symbolized objectivity, tolerance, and forward thinking—clear-headed modernity at its finest. Bryan symbolized narrowmindedness, tribalism, and social backwardness —tendentious Christianity at its worst.

Also from the beginning, the prosecution and defense understood the media circus being created, and each side choreographed its part, playing not only to a jury but to a nation at attention.

Did Scopes break the law?

On day one of the trial, as many as a thousand people crammed into the 700-seat courtroom. After a new indictment was returned (to ensure no mistrial), the selection of the jury began.

An early exchange revealed the partisan nature of the trial. Defense attorney Darrow, wearing purple suspenders, a white shirt, and a white string necktie, was examining a prospective juror, an itinerant preacher. Darrow asked, “What is your business?”

“I am a minister,” J. P. Massingill replied.

“Ever preach on evolution?”

“I don’t think so, definitely,” the minister said, “that is, on evolution alone.”

“Now, you wouldn’t want to sit on this jury unless you were fair, would you?”

“Certainly, I would want to be fair; yes, sir,” the minister replied.

Darrow asked him again whether he had preached on evolution, and the minister said he was strictly for the Bible.

Darrow pressed, “I’m talking about evolution. I am not talking about the Bible. Did you preach for or against evolution?”

When the minister said, “I preached against it, of course!” the courtroom erupted into applause.

“Let’s have order,” the judge barked, and eventually excused the minister from jury duty.

After the jury was selected, it was dismissed for two days as prosecution and defense argued whether the indictment was legitimate (the defense argued that the Butler Bill violated the Tennessee constitution in denying freedom of speech). In the end, the judge ruled the indictment was legitimate, and the defense entered a plea for Scopes: Not guilty.

On day four, each side made an opening statement. The defense argued the trial represented not a conflict between secular humanists and Christians, but between tolerant, educated Christians and intolerant, obscurantist Christians. Defense attorney Dudley Malone said, “We believe there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity. There may be a conflict between evolution and the peculiar ideas of Christianity which are held by Mr. Bryan as the evangelical leader of the prosecution, but we deny that the evangelical leader of the prosecution is an authorized spokesman for the Christians of the United States. … We maintain and we shall prove that Christianity is bound up with no scientific theory.”

The state, on the other hand, said the trial was about the immediate facts: did Scopes in fact violate the Tennessee statute?(right)

The state began its case in the afternoon, calling as its first witness Walter White, county superintendent of public instruction. White testified that Scopes had admitted to him that he had taught from the textbook Civic Biology, that Scopes confessed he “could not teach that book without teaching evolution,” and that “the statute was unconstitutional.”

In Darrow’s cross-examination, White admitted he had no complaint about Scopes’s work as a teacher.

The next state’s witness was 14-year-old Howard Morgan. He testified that his teacher, John Scopes, taught him about evolution, that “the earth was once a hot molten mass, too hot for plant or animal life to exist upon it.”

Prosecuting attorney Stewart asked Morgan, “How did he [Scopes] classify man with reference to other animals; what did he say about them?”

“Well, the book and he,” replied Morgan, “both classified man along with cats and dogs, cows, horses, monkeys, lions, horses, and all that.”

During his cross-examination, Darrow asked Morgan, “He [Scopes] didn’t say a cat was the same as a man?”

“No sir,” replied Morgan. “He said man had a reasoning power, that these animals did not.”

Darrow quipped, “There is some doubt about that, but that is what he said, is it?” and the courtroom guffawed.

Darrow then asked Morgan, “What he [Scopes] taught you … has not hurt you any, has it?”

Morgan replied, “No, sir,” and the courtroom once more broke into laughter.

Two more state’s witnesses testified that afternoon, and with that, Stewart said, “The state rests.” The prosecution had made its case in only a couple of hours.