The Trial of the Century

Quote of the day, courtesy of a 1925 Civil Rights leader, "“The law of evolution cannot be overthrown by the wisdom of a state where they burn men alive.”

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, when Tennessee public-school teacher John Scopes faced charges for teaching content straight from the state-mandated biology textbook. His offense? Violating the newly-passed Butler Act banning the teaching of “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.” Pound sand, Charles Darwin. 

But before going forward, here’s today’s tone-setting song:

Back to the Trial of the Century. The stage was Dayton, Tennessee—population 1,800. The courtroom was sweltering. The media frenzy was global, with 200 journalists on site. Front and center was substitute teacher John Scopes, the willing defendant recruited by the ACLU to challenge the Butler Act. Curiously, Scopes never asserted that humans had descended from apes — just spent a bit of class time covering the textbook’s generic evolution principles. But that’s all it took to face charges in a nation where books were being banned (e.g., Twain’s Huck Finn, Lewis’ Main Street, Joyce’s Ulysses, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), Blacks were being lynched, and political candidates were fueling widespread fear of immigrants polluting the purity of white Christian America. A century ago.

Scopes’ defense was led by Clarence Darrow, a self-proclaimed agnostic and fierce defender of civil liberties. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan—populist, three-time Presidential candidate, fundamentalist, and tacit KKK supporter. With a jury of twelve white Christian men, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The jury took nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. No chance of an appeal after the defense team missed the filing deadline.  

The real audience was the global public riveted by this battle over science, religion, the First Amendment, and government’s role in education. And Darrow’s closing argument resonates to this day:  

“Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers, the lecturers, the editors. At last, the pulpit, the press, the platform, the classroom — all must be silenced and chained. Then comes the complete blackout of the human mind.”

Fast forward to today, when school boards are banning books. Teachers are investigated for assigning The Diary of Anne Frank or To Kill a Mockingbird.  Oklahoma public schools are pushed to purchase POTUS-branded Bibles. Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Texas have mandated that all public-school classrooms post the Ten Commandments. We’re hard-pressed to find evidence that the human species has evolved over the past century. With our democracy in free fall, we heed Darrow’s guiding advice:  “There can be no democracy without an educated people.”  

As for me, I wish every high-school student took a serious religious studies course. That our science classes pushed students to critically analyze the evidence for evolution – facts, hypotheses, assumptions, and the validity of assertions. That every student learns The Ten Commandments, in ways that illuminate history, civics, morals, ethics, and integrity. But we need to go further than just posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Let’s require every American K12 classroom to post this prominently:  

Then, let’s require all students to take this high-stakes exam:

These simple steps would help America evolve to a higher plane, producing morally-grounded adults willing to fight to preserve our democracy and civil society. An America where, borrowing lyrics from that long-forgotten Monkees song, “we’re all too busy singing to put anybody down / the young generation with something important to say.”

Nervously,

Ted