Scopes
NAME: Scopes, John Thomas
ACHIEVEMENT(S): American high-school teacher who came to prominence as the
defendant in the infamous "Monkey Trial" (1925), accused of teaching Darwin's evolutionary theories in place of Creationism.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 3 August 1900, at Paducah, KY.
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 21 October 1970, in Shreveport, LA. Aged 70
DISCIPLINE: Teacher, geologist
FIELD: Education, geology
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Thomas Scopes and Mary Alva Brown
SIBLINGS: Two sisters
SPOUSE: Mildred Walker, married 1930
CHILDREN: Two children
EDUCATION: University of Illinois, 1920-22; University of Kentucky, 1922-24
MAJOR WORK: 'Center of the Storm': Memoirs of John T. Scopes', 1967 (with
James Presley)
LIFE AND TIMES:
While Scopes was at Kentucky, a row developed between the university officials and anti-evolutionists over whether evolution should be taught at the university, during which the liberals won and the anti-evolutionists defeated.
After graduation he was appointed football coach and teacher of algebra, physics and chemistry at Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee, about 40 miles from Chattanooga. In April 1925, Scopes' principal was taken ill, and Scopes began teaching biology also, which included classes on <taught theory of> Charles Darwin's* theory of evolution.
Meanwhile, in March 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act, making it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals."
The decree aroused national attention, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
advertised in May offering to underwrite the expenses for a legal challenge to the Butler Act - an offer that was declined by school administrators in Chattanooga, but was regarded with interest by business and civic leaders of Dayton, who wished to give their dwindling town (the population of which had fallen from 3,000 in the 1890s to 1,800 in 1925) national exposure.
As a result, Scopes was questioned and confirmed that evolution was integral to the teaching of biology, while adding that every teacher in the state must necessarily have violated the law because they had all been using the same, state-sanctioned textbook that covered evolution: Hunter's 'Civic Biology', since 1909.
Using a degree of pressure, Dayton's civic officials managed to persuade Scopes to stand as defendant in a test case, although (as he later stated in his biography) he was sufficiently naive not to consult a lawyer before agreeing to proceed.
Having publicly admitted the teaching of evolution, Scopes was immediately arrested and the ACLU began preparing his defence, engaging America's most famous defence lawyer (particularly as a defender of trade unionists), the 69-year-old <defended by> Darrow*. The case then became even more high-profile with the engagement by Tennessee state of William Jennings Bryan as the special prosecutor.
A former Secretary of State to Woodrow Wilson, Bryan was a three-times Democratic candidate for President and a well-known leader of the fundamentalist campaign against Darwin's theories and the teaching of evolution in many southern Bible belt states (and had, ironically enough, attended Salem High School before Scopes).
What followed was an extraordinary ten days in court. The presiding judge, John T. Raulston, allowed the opposing sides to be as partisan as possible, permitting extended speeches and appeals to the national audience.
After the lawyers' opening statements - during which Bryan claimed that "if evolution wins, Christianity goes", while Darrow argued that "Scopes isn't on trial; civilization is on trial" - the prosecution first presented its case, asking the court to take judicial notice of the Book of Genesis as it appears in the King James version, and calling a series of witnesses including seven students in Scope's class, who testified that he had taught them evolutionary theory.
Then on 16 July the defence called its first witness, Dr. Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from the John Hopkins University, but Metcalf's testimony was ruled inadmissable by the judge the following day. Now angry, Darrow then shocked the court by calling Bryan to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible and an extraordinary confrontation between Darrow and Bryan ensued, during which the latter came off much the worse.
However, afterwards the judge again ruled that the testimony was inadmissable and should be stricken from the evidence, ruling out any test of the law's constitutionality or argument on the validity of Darwin's theory, and stating again that the trial was concerned with only the single question of whether or not John T. Scopes had taught evolution, which he admittedly had.
By this time the trial was almost over: Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed to the federal Tennessee Supreme Court in order to test the critical constitutional issue, and on 21 July the jury complied, upon which Judge Raulston find Scopes $100.
A year later, in June 1926, Darrow argued the appeal at the Tennessee Supreme Court, and in January 1927 the court reversed the decision of the Dayton court on a technicality - i.e. not on constitutional grounds, as Darrow and the ACLU had hoped, but on judge's error (that the jury, not the judge, legally had to set the fine if above $50).
Rather than send the case back for futher action, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case, commenting "Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case". Thus, although Scopes had won, Tennessee no longer faced the prospect of having to defend the law's constitutionality in a federal court, and the statute remained on the state's books until it was repealed in 1967.
Although the Scopes trial by no means ended the debate over the teaching of evolution, it did represent a significant setback for the anti-evolution campaigners: of the 15 states with anti-evolution legislation pending in 1925, only two states (Arkansas and Mississippi) enacted laws restricting teaching of Darwin's theory.
After the trial, although Scopes was offered back his teaching post at Dayton High School, he instead accepted an offer from a group of scientists and newsmen of a graduate scholarship to study geology at the University of Chicago. He joined the university in September 1925 and after two years' study received his MSc.
However, on applying for a fellowship at Chicago, he was told by the university official administering the fellowship that "he should take his atheistic marbles and play elsewhere", and so in 1927 he accepted a job with the Gulf Oil Company as a geologist. Later in 1930, however, Scopes was fired by Gulf Oil because he refused to conduct an illegal survey for them, and he and his new wife returned to the United States.
He then entered the University of Chicago to study for a Ph.D. but by 1932 he had exhausted his funds and, now with two children to support, was forced to give up his studies and take a job as a surveyor with the United Gas Corporation (1933). From 1940 until his retirement in 1964, Scopes worked at the headquarters of the United Gas Corporation in Shreveport, Louisiana.
In 1960 he helped promote the film 'Inherit the Wind', which was based on the Scopes Trial, and during his retirement (aided by James Presley) he composed his autobiography, which gave a detailed description of the Scopes trial, entitled 'Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes' (1967).
At the time of his death, in 1970 in Shrevepoint, Louisiana, despite the repeal of the Butler Act in 1967, teachers in Tennessee still had to sign a pledge not to teach evolution, and no federal court had ruled on the constitutionality of anti-evolution statutes.
ASSESSMENT: Although in many ways a passive participant in the so-called "Monkey Trial", Scopes served as a powerful symbol of academic freedom to generations of American teachers.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: John T Scopes, defendant in the 'Monkey Trial'
BIBLIOGRAPHY: EB
Brown, Kathleen S., "Scopes, John Thomas", in 'Dictionary of American National Biography, NY & Oxford: OUP, 1999
Conkin, P. K., When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes and American Intellectuals, Lanham, Maryland & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998
Ray, Ginger, Six days or forever?: Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969