Evolution had been taught to high school students for decades, but little opposition to it existed. This was partly due to the fact that before the 1920’s, most children did not attend high school and so most of them were never exposed to the material. This situation changed in the ‘20s and with it came a growing opposition in many localities to the teaching of evolution or anything else that cast doubt on the Bible. Soon, state legislatures enacted measures to restrict the teaching of evolution. Tennessee did just this in January of 1925 when it quickly and quietly passed a bill that stated that it shall be unlawful for any teacher to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal. In May 1925, the newly-created American Civil Liberties Union went looking for someone to test the new law. John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was their man. Scopes was using A Civic Biology by George Hunter as his text. This book, the most widely used high school biology textbook of its era, contains three pages on evolution, including a brief passage on human evolution and a stereotypical racist classification of humans (“…the highest type of all, the Caucasians….”). In a publicity stunt orchestrated by the town fathers of Dayton, Tennessee, to put their small town on the national map, John Scopes was issued a warrant for teaching human evolution. The Scopes trial did indeed prove to be great theater. Clarence Darrow, a nationally famous trial lawyer (and noted opponent of religion) came to Dayton to defend Scopes. William Jennings Bryan (“The Great Commoner”), three-time Democratic nominee for president and staunch defender of conservative Protestantism, showed up on behalf of the prosecution. Over a series of days, Darrow mercilessly hammered away at biblical fundamentalism, including a cross examination of Bryan himself (in which Bryan professed to be “interested in the Rock of Ages, not the age of rocks”). The Scopes trial ended with Scopes’ conviction, but it was seen by many throughout the US to be a triumph for evolution over biblical fundamentalism. Ironically, the Scopes trial was legally about local control of what should and should not be taught in the schools, a concept quickly forgotten in the media frenzy of the day. The issue of local control would turn up again and again over the next 100 years.
The World's Most Famous Court Trial, Tennessee Evolution Case:
A Complete Stenographic Report of the Famous Court Test of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act,
At Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, Including Speeches and Arguments of Attorneys
To read Internet Archive books, you need to create a free Internet Archive account
A Civic Biology Presented in Problems (1914) by George W. Hunter
This is the text book used by John T. Scopes in his class where he taught about human evolution
