On the Day March 13 1925

Tennessee's Butler Bill Rejects Evolution

Khen Lim




Image source: todayinhistoryblog.wordpress.com

When John Washington Butler campaigned for a seat in the Tennessee House in 1922, his singular solitary focus was to oppose the evolution theory. In winning the election, Butler proposed a Bill that outlawed lessons on evolution in public schools, saying that it was illegal to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach that man descended from a lower order of animals.”

In 1921 when attending a church service, Butler, a prosperous 44-year-old farmer with an avid interest in education, heard a visiting preacher tell a story of a young college student who turned her back on the Christian faith after being taught evolutionary biology. From this, he realised the dangers that might imperil his own children in their later years of schooling. After all, could any of his children lose their faith in the same way? If it could happen to a young innocent girl, could it then happen to anyone in his own community?

Four years later on January 24, Butler heard William Jennings Bryan, an outstanding attorney, deliver a virulent condemnation of Darwinism in the state capital of Nashville, which inspired him to personally do something to counter the movement. And so, on his forty-ninth birthday, after breakfast, Butler sat in his lounge to turn out the words that soon would become the famous Butler Act.

John Washington Butler (Image source: christianity.com)

On March 13 1925, the proposed Bill was passed through the two houses of the Tennessee legislation with huge lopsided majorities in his favour. In the House of Representatives, 71 voted in favour of the Bill against 5 while in the Senate, a three-hour discussion passed with 24 for and 6 against. A week later, Governor Austin Peay signed it into law.

However the (still) notorious Washington-based American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decided to run an ad in a Chattanooga newspaper to launch their campaign to challenge the new law, offering to back any schoolteacher to dare teach evolution in class.

John Thomas Scopes, 1900-1970 (Image source: imgur.com)

While residents in the town of Dayton tended to view this as an opportunity for attention, it was 24-year-old John T. Scopes, a mathematics teacher, who enlisted to put the law to a crunch test. Invariably, he was caught discussing evolution with his students from the textbook Hunter’s Civic Biology.

And thus the stage was set for the Scopes Trial to take place with attendances by hundreds of reporters and others who jammed the Rhea County Courthouse in July 1925. While the case was a legal test of the validity of the Butler Act under which Scopes was charged, the media made it a sordid affair between God’s Word, the authority of the Bible and the plausibility of Darwinism.

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan (Image source: acrid-sentient.tumblr.com)

Meanwhile another prominent attorney, other than Bryan, also joined in the fight. Agnostic Clarence Darrow took the side of the evolutionists while Bryan stood on the creation side. Bryan might be a fundamentalist but he was no subscriber to the literal six-day creation. Instead he believed the each of the days represented an age, meaning that in his calculation, the earth was likely created before 4000BC. He also wasn’t against teaching evolution per se on the proviso that it was taught as mere theory and that Creationism remained the focus.

The amount of interest drawn to the Scopes Trial – referred to many as the ‘true trial of the century’ – was so intense that at one juncture, the town considered moving it to a baseball field where 20,000 could attend.

The trial itself had a farcical carnival edge to it. As if to spite the pro-Creationists, there were chimpanzees brought to the front lawn and a 3½-foot man whom they labelled as a ‘missing link,’ all in an attempt to sway the jurors of the primate-human relationship.

William Jennings Bryan (Image source: bookofdaystales.com)

As for Scopes, he presented himself as a Christian albeit one who thinks that Darwinism fits in well with his faith. His agnostic defence attorney, Darrow, launched modernist attacks against the Genesis story calling it, “fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.” The prosecuting attorney Bryan, on the other hand, characterised evolution as “millions of guesses strung together,” that shaped man to be “indistinguishable among the mammals.”

The jury found Scopes guilty but instead of a conviction, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed it on the technical ground that the judge, contrary to State Constitution, set a fine of $100.

Darrow, on the other hand, had made comments to the jury, urging them to convict Scopes in a hope that he could take it to a higher court where the state law could be made unconstitutional. Because of Judge Raulston’s decision to fine Scopes, this did not happen and the Butler Act remained law for forty more years.

Spencer Tracy's Inherit the Wind (Image source: payer.de)

In the movie Inherit the Wind made to depict the Scopes Trial, many of the characters were misrepresented. Bryan was portrayed as a jerk but in life, he was the one who paid Scopes’ fine. The movie made the fundamentalists look like hysterical fools and the general rural Tennessean community to be a bunch of ignorant hicks. The reality however is completely different. Bryan, who tragically died in Dayton five days after the trial, was a progressive Democrat who fought for fair wages, shorter work weeks, graduated income tax and many reforms that ultimately became law. He was also thrice the party nominee for U.S. President and he penned many Sunday School lessons that were widely adopted across the country.

The result of the trial helped to begin the anti-evolution crusade that fanned across to other states including Arkansas and Mississippi where similar bills were passed. Even in states without anti-evolution statutes, evolution in school biology curriculum became ambiguous. Teachers in local schools had backed away from teaching it while publishers withdrew such books and removed the topic from others.

However the sensationalistic publicity amplified by the liberal media that was generated by the trial had also helped to publicise the so-called scientific evidence for evolution, with the press calling it a moral victory for the modern era. In other words while Bryan had won the case, he had lost the argument because the trial itself had set America and the rest of the world on a downward godless spiral beginning on the day that Scopes was found guilty.

Another lawsuit by another teacher (Image source: jstor.org)

In 1967, another teacher, Gary L Scott brought suit against the State of Tennessee, citing his First Amendment right to free speech against wrongful dismissal. While the Senate defeated calls for repeal, Scott’s grievances attracted the attention of not just the ACLU but also very notable giants such as the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) who all successfully canvassed for him to be reinstated with full back pay. But that was not all.

Greatly encouraged by the success, Scott took the fight up one level by filing a federal class action lawsuit, determined now to turn it into a permanent injunction against the enforcement of the Butler Act once and for all. The Tennessee Senate reconsidered calls for repeal that were earlier denied and this time, reinstated it. By passing the motion to repeal, the Butler Act was terminated on May 17 1967 and the rest of America changed interminably and forever. Eventually as well, much of the rest of the world followed suit.

Image source: asinglewindow.com

As Darrow put it, the Scopes Trial was, ‘the first of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft.’ As for Scopes, he died in 1970, outliving the span of the law from which he was deemed to have violated. Still the struggle to prise evolution away from Creationism continues today in American schools.