Historical Background
The Butler Act
“That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach 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.”
This is an excerpt from the Butler Act, which was adopted in Tennessee in 1925, and afterwards by other states. It additionally outlined that an offending teacher would be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined between $100 and $500 for each offense. The bill was introduced by John Butler in Tennessee, thus its name.
Why did the bill become law? As America emerged from WWI, US citizens sought the relative simplicity and “normalcy” of prewar society. In rural areas, particularly in the South and Midwest, Americans turned to their faith for comfort and stability, and fundamentalist religion soared in popularity. Fundamentalists, who believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, locked into Darwin and the theory of evolution as “the most present threat to the truth they were sure they alone possessed.” With evolution as the enemy, they set out to get rid of it from their society,
beginning with the education system.
The Butler Act
The Scopes Trial - The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he purposely incriminated himself so that the case could have a defendant.
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 ($1395 in 2017), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the big-name lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes. The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion, against Fundamentalists, who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen as both a theological contest and a trial on whether "modern science" should be taught in schools.