John Scopes
John Scopes was just a young teacher in Tennessee when he unwittingly became a test case for promoting evolution in American schools. Tennessee had a law against teaching human evolution, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wanted to overturn it. It enlisted the top criminal attorney of the day, Clarence Darrow, to serve as Scopes attorney. As crafty as the day is long, he arrived in Tennessee armed with his bag of tricks.
William Jennings Bryan, the former presidential candidate and Secretary of State, had oratorical skills second to known. His "Cross of Gold" nomination acceptance speech in 1896 is considered one of the greatest political works in American history. He united the Populist and Democratic Parties then and laid the foundation for the takeover by the Democratic Party of American politics 36 years later.
After witnessing the horrors of World War I, Bryan became convinced that the teaching of evolution was leading society to ruination through war. "Survival of the fittest" provided an intellectual justification for the brutal killing of other nationalities and races. Bryan foresaw the ethnic cleansing that grew to its horrible culmination in the Holocaust.
Bryan defended the Tennessee law and its application to Scopes, with its mere $100 fine as the penalty for teaching evolution. Darrow agreed to take the witness stand in favor of teaching evolution if Bryan took the witness stand against it. Bryan then testified and performed well. So well, in fact, that Darrow reneged on his promise and forced Scopes to plead guilty to end the case. With that the trial ended, and Tennessee's law remained in effect for another half century. To this day, Tennesee schools teach little evolution, and George W. Bush won the presidential election by carrying this home state of his opponent, Al Gore.
A famous liberal reporter at the trial, H.L. Mencken, published such one-sided articles that it would make today's media blush. He excoriated Bryan at every possible turn, trying to make him look foolish. When Hollywood got into the act with a movie called "Inherit the Wind," it imitated Mencken's bias. Misinformed, many think Scopes and the evolutionists won the trial, but conservative rule in Tennessee today reflects the true outcome.
The case ended with a guilty verdict, and Scopes was fined $100, which Bryan and the ACLU offered to pay. The case was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court which found the Butler Act constitutional, but overturned Scopes conviction on a technicality: the judge had set the fine instead of the jury. The Butler Act remained until 1967 when it was repealed by the Tennessee legislature.
Scopes may have actually been innocent of the crime to which his name is inexorably linked. After the trial Scopes admitted to reporter William Kinsey Hutchinson "I didn't violate the law," explaining he had skipped the evolution lesson and his lawyers had coached his students to go on the stand; the Dayton businessmen had assumed he had violated the law. Hutchinson did not file his story until after the Scopes appeal was decided in 1927. Scopes also admitted the truth to the wife of the Modernist minister Charles Francis Potter. Scopes was not allowed to take the stand at his trial for fear he would reveal his ignorance and turned down a $50,000 offer to lecture on evolution on the vaudeville stage because he did not know enough about the subject.