Tennessee Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Evolution

In the 1920s six states throughout the American South introduced bills to prohibit public schools from teaching evolution and denying the literal truth of the creation account found in the biblical book of Genesis. Two of the bills were defeated, and by 1925 three were still pending. Tennessee was the only one of the six that had actually passed such a bill, formally titled An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of the Evolution Theory in All the Universities, Normals and All Other Public Schools of Tennessee. The Tennessee Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Evolution, also called the Butler Act after its author, state representative John Washington Butler (1875–1952), was eventually repealed in 1967, but in the meantime religious fundamentalists backed anti-evolution bills in twelve states. The Mississippi legislature passed such a bill in 1926, and Arkansas enacted a similar bill by popular referendum in 1928; the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Arkansas law in 1968.

The Tennessee Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Evolution was in many respects symbolic. The 1920s was a decade of tension between modern big-city life and traditional rural life. Urban sophisticates and small-town religious fundamentalists glared at each other across a seemingly impassable cultural divide. No one thought the Tennessee law would ever be enforced. But in the eyes of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the law violated the right to free speech, and the organization wanted to mount a test case to get the law struck down. The ACLU formed a plan and persuaded John Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old physics teacher, to help implement it. Ironically, Scopes never actually taught evolution; he filled in one day for a biology teacher and assigned textbook pages that discussed evolution. Nevertheless, he was charged and brought to trial.

The trial was a national sensation as a carnival-like atmosphere surrounded Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. The American Telephone and Telegraph Co. installed 10.5 miles of lines to speed transmission of stories about the trial. More than two hundred reporters descended on the town for the trial, which pitted William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), a three-time presidential candidate and a hero to conservative, rural America, against Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), a gifted orator and widely known “big city” defense attorney. Their battle, and the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” would be immortalized in a 1955 Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee called Inherit the Wind.

The jury found Scopes guilty. The judge fined him $100, but the fine proved to be the ACLU's undoing. According to state law, the jury—not the judge—was meant to impose the fine. Thus, after the verdict was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, the court remanded the case to the trial court because of the fine but never resolved the free-speech issue related to the Tennessee Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Evolution, allowing each side to claim victory. Still in the twenty-first century, the debate between the scientific view of evolution and the “creationist” view of religious fundamentalists continues to rage; as late as 2009, the Texas Board of Education voted that Texas textbooks must teach “intelligent design” (the concept of a creator God) alongside evolution and question the validity of fossil records that support evolutionary theory. In some school districts, stickers are placed on biology textbooks “warning” students that evolution is “only” a theory. At issue continues to be the balance between rights of free speech and the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”