July 10, 2026

The Defendant Never Taught Evolution. They Convicted Him Anyway.

On July 10, 1925, the most famous trial in American science opened in a Tennessee courthouse. It was a publicity stunt, the defendant wasn't sure he'd broken the law, and the man who won the case was dead within days of the verdict.

Nearly a thousand people, 300 of them standing, jammed the Rhea County Courthouse on the morning of July 10, 1925. Judge John T. Raulston opened by reading the Butler Act, the Tennessee statute that made it a crime to teach "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible," and then, for good measure, read the first chapter of Genesis aloud to the grand jury.

The defendant, 24-year-old John T. Scopes, sat accused of teaching evolution. He was a football coach and general science teacher who had substituted for the regular biology instructor. He had agreed to stand trial. The trouble was, he wasn't certain he had ever taught the subject. On the day evolution came up in his lesson plan, he had been out sick.

The trial was not his idea. It was a stunt, hatched over sodas at Robinson's Drug Store in Dayton. The ACLU, founded five years earlier, wanted a test case against the Butler Act and placed a newspaper ad in Chattanooga offering to defend any teacher willing to break it. George Rappleyea, who managed a nearly bankrupt coal company in town, saw the ad and saw a chance to save his dying community. He and a few civic boosters sent for Scopes, picked him partly because he was a young bachelor from out of state with no local family to face harassment, and asked him to admit to teaching evolution. Scopes said he had gone over the evolution chapter with the class. That was enough.

What turned a small-town stunt into the Trial of the Century was the cast. Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in America, volunteered for Scopes because he wanted a showdown with William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and the country's leading fundamentalist, who had volunteered for the prosecution. The ACLU did not want Darrow, fearing his atheism would hurt the case. Scopes overruled his own lawyers and insisted on him. He had to read the newspapers to learn what his defense team was planning.

The circus came with them. More than 200 reporters filled Dayton, 22 telegraphers sending 165,000 words a day. WGN broadcast the trial live, the first criminal trial on national radio. Cameramen flew their film out daily from a makeshift airstrip. Monkey-themed souvenirs sold on the courthouse lawn. A trained chimpanzee named Joe Mendi performed at the hotel. Bryan himself told the court that more words had been cabled to Europe and Australia about the trial than about anything else ever to happen in the United States.

The climax came on July 20, the seventh day, when Darrow called Bryan to the witness stand and cross-examined him on the Bible. Did Bryan believe Jonah was swallowed by a whale? Bryan corrected him: "a big fish." Did he believe Joshua commanded the sun to stand still? Bryan said he did, conceding only that the earth revolves around the sun. Darrow pressed him on the flood, on the age of the earth, on the six days of creation, until Bryan accused him of trying to "slur at the Bible." Darrow fired back that he was examining Bryan on his "fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes."

The jury found Scopes guilty in under nine minutes. The judge fined him $100. Bryan had won. Five days later, on July 26, he died in his sleep in Dayton, aged 65, of a stroke.

The conviction did not last. In 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality: state law required that any fine over $50 be set by a jury, not a judge. The court upheld the Butler Act but added, "We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case." The law stayed on the books, unenforced, for 40 more years. Tennessee finally repealed it in May 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court did not strike down anti-evolution laws nationwide until 1968.

Here is the twist. The textbook Scopes was accused of teaching from, George William Hunter's Civic Biology, did not stop at evolution. It ranked the races on an evolutionary scale, calling Caucasians "the highest type of all," and it advocated eugenics, asking whether "the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women" might be improved by "applying to them the laws of selection." Bryan had opposed evolution precisely because of its association with eugenics and social Darwinism. The man who won the trial was right about the textbook and wrong about the science, and he was dead before he could make the distinction. A century on, the argument over what schools may teach still fills courthouses, with different books on the table.

Also on this day

• In 1584, William the Silent, leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain, was shot dead on a staircase in Delft by Balthasar Gérard, the first recorded assassination of a head of state with a handgun.
• In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill admitting Wyoming as the 44th state, the first to guarantee women the right to vote in its constitution, 30 years before the 19th Amendment.
• In 1940, the Luftwaffe mounted its first large-scale attack on British shipping, the engagement the RAF officially recognizes as the opening day of the Battle of Britain.
• In 1962, NASA launched Telstar 1, the first active communications satellite, which relayed the first live transatlantic television signal days later and opened the era of global broadcasting.

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