The Monkey Trial

The Monkey Trial

At the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, was Scopes found guilty or innocent?

THE ISSUE of evolution had become more and more divisive ever since Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Initially, conservative Christians were divided over the question as to whether evolution contradicted the biblical account of Creation. Some who held to the inerrancy of the Scriptures believed that God may have used limited means of evolution in his creative activity. Others argued that evolution was diametrically opposed to the biblical account of Creation.

Following World War I, many prominent members of the emerging Fundamentalist movement went aggressively on the attack against evolution, believing that it undermined the authority of the Scriptures. One of the leading critics of evolution was William Jennings Bryan. Bryan had become a national figure as a politician. Three times he was the Democratic nominee for president. In 1896 he was defeated by William McKinley and in 1900 and 1904 by Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912 when Woodrow Wilson was elected president, he made William Jennings Bryan his secretary of state.

When Bryan resigned as secretary of state in 1915, he threw himself into leadership of the Christian movement in America. As Bryan saw the moral standards of America crumbling around him, he became convinced that a prime cause was Darwin’s view of the origin of man.

Beginning in 1921, Bryan began actively attacking evolution. In his popular lecture “The Menace of Darwinism,” he argued that evolution robbed man of the stimulus for moral living.

Due in large measure to Bryan’s efforts, the opposition to evolution became a national movement in the 1920s. A number of Southern states passed laws outlawing the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The law passed in Tennessee was one of the strongest. It made it illegal “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.”

Within two weeks of the Tennessee governor’s signing the bill into law, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that they would test the law. They promised to provide counsel to any teacher in Tennessee willing to be the defendant in the case. Some prominent citizens of Dayton, Tennessee, persuaded John Scopes, a young science teacher, to break the law and allow himself to be arrested. The ACLU provided him with a star-studded defense team headed by Clarence Darrow, a religious skeptic and the nation’s most famous trial attorney. The attorneys for the prosecution asked William Jennings Bryan to become their lead attorney.

The resulting Monkey Trial, as the Scopes trial came to be known, proved to be one of the first great media events in history, with reporters packing the little town of Dayton and wiring their stories around the world. There was even a nationwide radio hookup. The reporters particularly delighted in portraying the Christians of Tennessee as backward hillbillies.

Bryan gave an impassioned speech for the prosecution, and then the drama of the trial reached its crescendo when Darrow called Bryan as an expert witness on the Bible for the defense. Bryan’s difficulty in answering many of Darrow’s questions brought him ridicule from the press. A tired old man at this point, Bryan’s testimony consisted of more fervor than fact. The following day the judge struck all of Bryan’s testimony as a defense witness from the record.

On July 21, 1925, the jury found Scopes guilty in just a few minutes. He was fined $100, but the Tennessee Supreme Court later threw out the conviction on a technicality. The big story nationally, however, was that the most famous trial lawyer of the day had humiliated the nation’s greatest orator. The Bible had won in Dayton, but in the eyes of the nation’s press evolution had won.

William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep the following Sunday.

Reflection

The world is most interested in who wins and who loses. Ultimately, who do you think were the real winners and losers of the Scopes trial? Why do you think the press was so quick to ridicule Christians? If you could rewrite this chapter of history, how would you do it?

If you are asked about your Christian hope, always be ready to explain it.

1 Peter 3:15