This day in history July 21 1925 {Monkey Trial ends}

In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" ends with John Thomas Scopes being convicted of teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law. Scopes was ordered to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed.

In March 1925, the Tennessee legislature had passed the anti-evolution law, making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine 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." With local businessman George Rappalyea, Scopes had conspired to get charged with this violation, and after his arrest the pair enlisted the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to organize a defense. Hearing of this coordinated attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defense, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in U.S. history.

On July 10, the trial got underway, and within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton as preachers set up revival tents along the city's main street to keep the faithful stirred up. Inside the Rhea County Courthouse, the defense suffered early setbacks when Judge John Raulston ruled against their attempt to prove the law unconstitutional and then refused to end his practice of opening each day's proceeding with prayer.

Outside, Dayton took on a carnival-like atmosphere as an exhibit featuring two chimpanzees and a supposed "missing link" opened in town, and vendors sold Bibles, toy monkeys, hot dogs, and lemonade. The "missing link" was in fact Jo Viens of Burlington, Vermont, a 51-year-old man who was of short stature and possessed a receding forehead and a protruding jaw. One of the chimpanzees--named "Joe Mendi"--wore a plaid suit, a brown fedora, and white spats, and entertained Dayton's citizens by monkeying around on the courthouse lawn.

In the courtroom, Judge Raulston destroyed the defense's strategy by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible--on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated. The next day, Raulston ordered the trial moved to the courthouse lawn, fearing that the weight of the crowd inside was in danger of collapsing the floor.

In front of several thousand spectators in the open air, Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called Bryan to the stand in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up.

In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

John Scopes died in my father's arms. Kinda.

He was chatting away at a party and suddenly pitched forward and my dad caught him. Heart attack. I don't know if he died on the spot, or later in the hospital.

At least, I think that's how the story went.

A good while ago, I was reading some a transcript from the trial, and came across an interesting scientific datum offered by the defense. They asserted that according to science, the earth was 60 million (?) years old. I'm not sure the figure given was 60 million years -- hence the question mark -- but I think that may be in the right ballpark. At least it was at very great odds with more recent scientific dating.

Freepers, have any of you come across this age-of-the-earth number? Or do you want to research it? Maybe those transcripts are available on the 'Net by now.

The liberals of that era had a great old time of it flaying "fundamentalists" as yokels, and that is what the liberals remember to this day about the Scopes trial. But if anything, they were and are the more credulous themselves.

Any word on the fact hat most of the evidence used in the trial being fraudulant? IMHO the Scopes trial was less about the advancement of science and more about driving God from the people.

I've worked for museums on several digs. There is sometimes more guessing than science. There is the constant push to find the "oldest" something. There is much less effort science than sensationalism. I've collected and have seen artifacts that didn't "fit" the model and where placed on shelves for "further analysis." There were uncounted boxes, decades old, that have never been reopened. I guess they just weren't important. Anyone remember the Tasaday of the Philipines???

Come from Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) physicist. While undoubtablty a great scientist, he was not in reality the omniscient and veracious demigod worshipped by the Young Earth Creationists. ("Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Lord Kelvin -1895)

The concept of Deep Time had been established by geologists, which wasn't a problem for Creationist until Darwin came along. Then it had to be debunked.

Im 1883 Kelvin produced his estimate that the Earth could be no more than 100 million years old, later c.1900 refined to 55 million.

Suffice it to say, neither number is valid. Kelvin's hypothesis for the formation of the Earth was totally wrong, and overlooked critcal factors. And the "refined" estimate was produced by fudging the figures for thermal conductivity of rock. The 1883 estimate had used the figure accepted at the time, close to the values accepted today.

Interesting. I thank you.

But I'm not sure we have the story here. You related that Kelvin did his estimate in 1883. But the Scopes Trial was 42 years later. If Kelvin's figure was so open to question in the world of science itself, why did the Scopes DEFENSE present it as scientific truth nearly half a century later?

>> Suffice it to say, neither number is valid.

Well........ we don't think either number is valid -- now. But the thing is, it was presented -- and accepted -- as scientific truth, evidently for quite a long period. The underlying question, which is religious in nature, is what Authority does one believe? Those who knelt down to science and derided the Bible were the suckers here. What they so devoutly believed was nonsense. It amazes me that they can go right on believing in the inerrancy of science today with a completely different set of scientifically "authenticated" figures. Their "god" made a terrible factual mistake and it doesn't shake their faith at all.

> Any word on the fact hat most of the evidence used in the trial being fraudulant?

There wasn't much evidence involved.

The Scopes defense relied on rhetoric. Its client was guilty and it really had no case save to try to show that the law was based on falsehood. The prosecution relied on a simple factual case that Scopes violated the law, and that the law was a proper statement of the state's interest. The court properly disregarded the rhetoric. In fact, at one point, as I recall, it reprimanded Darrow for flaming Bryan, and could have held him in contempt. Darrow apologized profusely.

In due course, the latter, narrow view prevailed, and Scopes was convicted.

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