March 18, 2025: ScopesStudying: John Scopes

[100 yearsago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the ButlerAct, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy that law and the famoustrial it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks oneducators.]

On threeinteresting facts about the Tennesseescience teacher and football coach who became the center of one of America’smostfamous trials.

1)     Innocence?: I think it’s become relativelywell known (at least compared to many historical realities) that Scopes wasrecruited (by geologistGeorge Rappleyea and other scientists and businessmen in the town of Daytonwhere Scopes taught) to stand trial for violating the Butler Act. But what Ididn’t realize until researching this series was that even by the letter ofthat restrictive law, Scopes might have been innocent—it’s true that the textbookhe and all state biology teachers in that era were required to use, GeorgeWilliam Hunter’s Civic Biology, included a chapter on evolution; butScopes later admittedto local reporter William Kinsey Hutchinson that he had omitted thatchapter from his lessons. Hutchinson didn’t publish his story until after thetrial’s verdict, or perhaps this famous trial would have ended differently.

2)     A Socialist Campaign: In any case, Scopes wasfound guilty on July 21, 1925, and his conviction was upheldby the Tennessee Supreme Court a year later (although they vacated his $100fine because the judge, rather than the jury, had determined the amount). Thetrial and verdict would linger with Scopes for the rest of his life, onlybecoming 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 particularlyinteresting detail is that in1932 he ran an at-large campaign for a U.S. House of Representatives seatfrom Kentucky (his childhood home, to which he and his family had relocatedafter the trial) as aSocialist Party candidate. Probably wouldn’t help his case withconservative Tennessee neighbors if they knew that fact, but it makes clearthat he wasn’t just recruited or forced into political conversations.

3)     A Late-Life Embrace: Again, for a long timeScopes saw the trial and verdict as an albatross, but in the decade before his1970 death he began to change his perspective. That shift is particularly clearin a trio of 1960 events: attending the July U.S. premiere of the filmInherit the Wind (on which more in Thursday’s post), telling the storyof the trial on an Octoberepisode of the TV game show To Tell the Truth, and taking part in thatyear’s celebrations of JohnT. Scopes Day in Dayton. Scopes would lean into those associations with thetrial for the rest of his life, culminating in his emphasis on that story inhis 1967 autobiography Center of the Storm: Memoirsof John T. Scopes—the first edition of which, as you can see at thathyperlink, features a monkey on the cover, natch.

NextScopes context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?