Nick Spencer reports from Tennessee on the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. 17/07/25
As I leave the courthouse, someone tells me that I am going to hell. He’s not speaking to me personally; more, to anyone who might be listening. But as I’m the only one around, I choose to take it personally.
I am in Dayton, Tennessee, and speaking at the Scopes at 100 symposium. The Scopes “Monkey” trial occurred in July 1925. Superficially a conflict between evolutionists and creationists, it was, above all, a feeding frenzy. Over 200 reporters and photographers attended, as well as numerous radio technicians and a film crew. Journalists filed over two million words, and the trial was the first to be broadcast on US national radio. This was a ‘media circus’ before the phrase existed.
The basic plot line is straightforward. The state of Tennessee had recently outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools. John Scopes broke the law and was prosecuted. The prosecution persuaded the orator, campaigner, Fundamentalist Christian, and three–time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to act for them. The defence called on the services of the America Civil Liberties Union and Clarence Darrow, the country’s foremost criminal lawyer. The case was open and shut – Scopes had broken the law – but in arriving at this conclusion Darrow ran rings round Bryan and the religious anti–evolutionists, who were humiliated before a global audience.
That, anyway, is the basic plot. As ever, the real story is more complex. The trial was as much a commercial ploy – to put Dayton (which had seen better days) back on the map – as it was a serious legal case. Scopes was a football coach and general science teacher, and had seemingly not even taught the outlawed lesson, though he was always murky about this in later life. And while the presenting issue was, undoubtedly, evolution vs (what we would now call) creationism, many of the Fundamentalist protagonists, such as Bryan, had not, until quite recently, been that bothered about evolution. “I do not carry the doctrine of evolution as truth as some do,” he told a religious gathering in 1904, “but I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory.”
So, why then – other than crafty commercialism – did it explode in 1925, and become something worth commemorating a century later?
The question has numerous answers (I unpack them at greater length in my book Magisteria for those interested to read more). In brief: evolution had become a lot more credible over the previous quarter century, with the discovery of genetics and radioactivity. It had become more public, with discussion of Darwinism migrating from the academy to wider public debate and thence to school curricula. It had become more political, with many worried by the way in which the evolutionary struggle for survival had been used to justify German belligerence in the Great War. And, above all, it had become more social, closely tied up with the eugenics movement that was spreading across America at the time.
Textbooks such as G. W. Hunter’s A Civic Biology, on which the Scopes trial was based, taught evolution, including of humans, without apology or reservation. But they also taught what they considered to be the scientifically–grounded social implications of Darwinism. In his chapter on heredity and variation, Hunter explained how sexual immorality, alcoholism, epilepsy, feeble–mindedness, and other social problems were fundamentally biological issues.
“Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to–day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.”
The book also suggested ‘The Remedy’, as the relevant section described it.
“If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.”
This wasn’t simply empty verbiage. Indiana had been the first to pass a forced sterilisation law in 1907 and dozens of states followed, sterilising criminals, drunks, promiscuous women, ‘morons’ and ‘imbeciles’ (‘scientific’ definitions of intelligence), as well as a number of poor, unemployed, disabled and black citizens. Some states resisted the movement – Tennessee never passed a sterilisation law, though bills were proposed – but the great Oliver Wendell Holmes, who sat on the Supreme Court for 30 years, nonetheless spoke for his era when he famously declared, in the case of the sterilisation of the ‘mentally defective’ Carrie Buck, two years after the Scopes trial, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The truth is that discussion of evolution is rarely only about evolution, and it certainly wasn’t here. To be clear, Bryan and his allies did not believe in human evolution (Bryan’s own position hardened in the 1910s and early ‘20s), and they were wrong not to do so. But Bryan had spent a lifetime campaigning for the common man – he was known as The Great Commoner – and all too often the kind of biology taught in evolutionary textbooks treated the common man, particularly the poorer and less intelligent common man, as a “true parasite” of society.
Which brings me back to my encounter outside the court room. I politely took a leaflet from street preacher’s sidekick (I’m so English) and walked on, but something the preacher said as I crossed the street stayed with me. “Can you take evolution into the juvenile centre over there [there is one in Dayton] and offer them the prospect of a new life?”
I could have been back in 1925. For all that the leaflet I took does its best to undermine the fossil, anatomical, genetic, and observational evidence for evolution – its best being not very good – it doesn’t take much insight to see his shouted comment as the real issue. It is the fear, as palpable among some today as it was a century ago, that embracing Darwinism necessarily involves an irreversible degradation of the human; a non–negotiable (because “scientific”) assertion that humans are “nothing but” their evolutionary past or their genes or their unconscious but calculated desire to survive; that humans devoid of dignity, free will, eternal hope, and the chance to start over; that we are nothing but “chemical scum”.
Evolution does not necessitate that, at all. The c. 40% of Americans who reject evolution, along with the much smaller number of Britons, and the varying (and perhaps growing?) number of people in the Islamic world who are in the same position, are wrong to do so. Empirical evidence for evolution is stronger now than ever (Richard Dawkins provides a typically compelling case here). But, as a proper reading of the Scopes Trial shows, and as my street–preaching friend underlines, so much of the conversation about evolution is less about evolution than about its alleged social, political, philosophical and religious implications. In effect, it is caught in one big category mistake, physics confused for metaphysics. Not until we disentangle these will we see any real progress is this venerable quarter of the science and religion debate.
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