Tennessee vs Scopes Monkey Trial

LadyEagle · Nov 14, 2004

Tennessee vs John Scopes - The Monkey Trial

TIME LINE OF EVOLUTION-CREATIONISM DEBATE:


1919 George W. Hunter publishes Civic Biology, a textbook designed for high school biology students. The book contains a section on evolution. It includes racist suggestions and endorses controversial ideas, such as sterilization of epileptics and the mentally feeble, from the then-popular field of eugenics. The book will be adopted by Tennessee and assigned as reading in the classroom of John Scopes. The year also marks the inaugural conference of William B. Riley's World Christian Fundamentals Association.

1922 William Jennings Bryan, William B. Riley, John R. Straton, T. T. Martin (and other religious leaders) began a campaign for legislation that will ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.

January 24, 1924 William Jennings Bryan delivers a major speech in Nashville attacking evolution.

January 21, 1925 John Washington Butler introduces a bill in the Tennessee House of Representatives to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The bill will later become the Butler Act, and will be the basis for the prosecution of John Scopes.

February 1925 Evangelist Billy Sunday holds revival meetings in Tennessee. He tells rapt crowds, "Education today is chained to the Devil's throne."

March 21, 1925 Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signs the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools. He expresses the opinion that the law will never be enforced.

April 21, 1925 Scopes discusses with his biology students the section on evolution in Hunter's Civic Biology, according to the later testimony of Superintendent Walter White. (A student, in his testimony, puts the date as "about the middle of April." The original indictment identifies the date of his teaching evolution as "the 24th day of April.")

May 1, 1925 The school year ends at the Rhea County High School.

May 3, 1925 The ACLU discusses the Tennessee antievolution act at a board meeting in New York. The board decides to issue a press announcement that it stood willing to support any teacher that challenged the law's constitutionality.

May 4, 1925 The Chattanooga Daily Times publishes a story reporting that the ACLU is hoping to mount a challenge to the Butler Act and that it is looking for a teacher willing to serve as a defendant in a test case. The story is read by a Dayton coal plant manager, George Rappalyea.

May 5, 1925 At a gathering of town leaders at Robinson's drug store in Dayton, George Rappalyea proposes holding a trial that will test the constitutionality of Tennessee's new antievolution law. Scopes, fetched from a tennis court, comes to Robinson's and indicates his willingness to be a defendant. A warrant is issued for the arrest of John Scopes.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopeschrono.html

INTRO to Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee

The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished.

Who would dominate American culture--the modernists or the traditionalists? Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925. There a jury was to decide the fate of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The guilt or innocence of John Scopes, and even the constitutionality of Tennessee's anti-evolution statute, mattered little. The meaning of the trial emerged through its interpretation as a conflict of social and intellectual values.

<snip>

Opening statements pictured the trial as a titanic struggle between good and evil or truth and ignorance. Bryan claimed that "if evolution wins, Christianity goes." Darrow argued, "Scopes isn't on trial; civilization is on trial." The prosecution, Darrow contended, was "opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages." To the gasps of spectators, Darrow said Bryan was responsible for the "foolish, mischievous and wicked act." Darrow said that the anti-evolution law made the Bible "the yardstick to measure every man's intellect, to measure every man's intelligence, to measure every man's learning."
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http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm

40 years later (in 1965), John Scopes reflects on the trial:

"The trial marked a beginning of the development of a national consciousness of the roles played by religion, science, and education. I think the importance of communicating the thinking of the professionals in these fields to the general public was first generally appreciated during and immediately after the trial.

I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism. Each year—as the result of someone’s efforts to better interpret what the defense was trying to do—more and more people are reached. This, in conjunction with the labor of scientists, educators, ministers and with the dissemination of the results of their efforts through books and news media, has retarded the spread of fundamentalism."
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http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopesreflections.html

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, MR. SCOPES.

blackbird · Nov 14, 2004

You mean, Blackbird is related to Cheetah(of Tarzan acclaim)??????

I'm more important in the eyes of society than I thought!!!

mioque · Nov 14, 2004

"It includes racist suggestions and endorses controversial ideas, such as sterilization of epileptics and the mentally feeble, from the then-popular field of eugenics."
"
Interestingly enough the book spends more pages on these subjects than it does evolution, also worth mentioning is that nobody complained about the eugenics bits back then.

Tennessee vs Scopes Monkey Trial

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Tennessee vs Scopes Monkey Trial

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