100 years later, the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial' still resonates

Winnipeg Free Press

2 days ago

Opinion
The tiny unincorporated community of Petersburg, Ky., 32 kilometres west of Cincinnati, Ohio, is home to the state-of-the-art Creation Museum, a 75,000 square-foot facility that 'allows families to experience history as God has revealed in the Bible.'
Opened in 2007, the museum is the brainchild of Ken Ham, now 74 years old, an Australian Christian fundamentalist and former science teacher. After he relocated to the United States, he established his Christian creationist organization/ministry, Answers in Genesis (AIG) and initially raised about US$35 million towards the museum's development. In 2016, AIG opened Ark Encounter, located in Williamstown, Ky., 64 kilometres from the museum, a theme-park that features a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark — built according to the specifications outlined in the Book of Genesis.
Ticket prices to the museum and ark are not inexpensive — nearly US$110 for adults and US$60 for youth ages 11 to 17. Nonetheless, since 2017, there have been an average of 800,000 visitors each year. And since 2007, more than 10 million adults and children have wandered through the exhibits, which postulates among other controversial suppositions, that about 4,300 years ago dinosaurs and humans co-existed and that dinosaurs were washed away in the Great Flood that precipitated Noah constructing his ark.
The dinosaur flood theory might sound a bit off the wall, yet creationist beliefs remain somewhat strong in the U.S. Last July, a Gallup poll found that 37 per cent of Americans are convinced that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years (in 2007, it was 42 per cent).
About the same number of Americans — 44 per cent in a 2022 poll — think that creationist ideas should be taught in schools. Canadian opinion is no different. According to a 2024 poll conducted by Research Company in Vancouver, 41 per cent of Canadians think creationism should be part of the school curriculum.
At the same time, a large number of Americans and Canadians equally believe that the theory of evolution advanced by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century should have a prominent place in education.
The most famous debate between creationists and evolutionists occurred a hundred years ago this summer in a courtroom in the sleepy town of Dayton, Tenn.
In 1925, the state of Tennessee had passed an anti-evolution statute, which banned teaching 'any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.' (The political alignment was quite different then: the legislation was spearheaded by John W. Butler, a Democratic Party state representative.)
Any educator violating the act could be found guilty of a misdemeanour and fined a maximum of US$500 and not less than US$100.
The American Civil Liberties Union decided to challenge the act. The organization found a willing volunteer to test the new law in John Scopes, a 24-year-old science teacher and football coach at Dayton's high school.
He had used a state-sanctioned biology text in his classroom that included a chapter on Darwin's theory of evolution. He was charged with violating the statute and the matter wound up in court.
Over a period of 11 days, from July 10 to 21, the 'Monkey Trial' — so named because of the misinterpreted view that Darwin was supposed to have claimed that humans were directly descended from apes — was the number one news story in North America and beyond. Hundreds of journalists descended upon Dayton including the witty writer and critic H.L. Mencken, who covered every fascinating moment of the proceedings, referring to it as the greatest trial 'since that held before (Pontius) Pilate.'
The high drama in the court mainly owed to the participation of Clarence Darrow, at the time the most famous criminal attorney in the U.S., who had been recruited by the ACLU to defend Scopes; and William Jennings Bryan, a celebrated orator and Democratic Party politician, who acted for the prosecution.
For years, Bryan had mocked Darwin's theories (Mencken called him a 'fundamentalist Pope').
Darrow and Bryan argued about the history of western civilization, Darwin's writings, and the accuracy of the Bible. The judge even allowed Darrow to call Bryan as a witness and question him about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and Noah's Ark.
In the end, Scopes was found guilty and fined US$100. It was a hollow victory for the creationists. Still, Tennessee (among other states) did not repeal the 1925 legislation until 1967.
The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a legal challenge about Arkansas' education laws, that permitting the teaching of creationism while outlawing the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional.
Since then, creationists have tried many times to have creationism re-integrated into state curricula — reframing it as 'intelligent design,' which 'proposes that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than an undirected process like natural selection' — but have been unsuccessful.
Considering the current volatile and polarized political climate in the U.S. and the fact that the creationism and evolution debate is part of the battle over religion, morality and culture, the odds are good that this dispute about the meaning of life will continue for the foreseeable future.
Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.