On May 5, 1925, high school science teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in one of Tennessee’s public schools. Scopes had agreed to act as defendant in a case intended to test Tennessee’s new law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in its public schools. On May 4, the day before Scopes’s arrest, the Chatanooga Times had run an ad in which the American Civil Liberties Union offered to pay the legal fees of a Tennessee teacher who was willing to act as a defendant in a test case. Several Dayton residents hatched a plot at a local drugstore. They hoped that a trial of this type would bring much needed publicity to the tiny town of Dayton.
The men enlisted several local attorneys and one easy-going teacher who believed in academic freedom and in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which states that all organisms developed from earlier forms through a process of natural selection. While volumes of scientific evidence support the theory of evolution, many felt that it contradicted the story of creation as described in the Bible and thus did not want evolution taught in schools.
The trial pitted famous labor and criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow against former senator and secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, who worked for the prosecution. The trial was such a media circus that, on the seventh day in the courtroom, the judge felt compelled to move the proceedings outdoors under a tent due to the unbearable heat and for fear that the weight of all the spectators and reporters would cause the floor to cave in.
As Judge John T. Raulston incrementally disallowed the use of the trial as a forum on the merits or validity of Darwin’s theory, the trial swiftly drew to a close. The jury took only nine minutes to return a verdict of guilty. After all, Scopes had admitted all along that he had, in fact, taught evolution. As the trial came to a close, reporter and critic H.L. Mencken explained to readers of the Baltimore Sun and the American Mercury:
All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant. There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant. Judge Raulston finished the benign business yesterday morning by leaping with soft judicial hosannas into the arms of the prosecution.When the defense appealed the verdict, the Tennessee State Supreme Court acquitted Scopes on a technicality but upheld the constitutionality of the state law. Not until 1967 did Tennessee lawmakers overturn the law, finally allowing teachers to teach evolution. The trial did bring Dayton, Tennessee a great deal of publicity, mostly comprised of reinforcements of a stereotype of the south as an intellectual backwater, certainly not the type Daytonians had hoped to attract.