{"id":141152,"date":"2025-03-18T07:09:27","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T07:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/americanstudies-march-18-2025-scopesstudying-john-scopes\/"},"modified":"2025-03-18T07:09:27","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T07:09:27","slug":"americanstudies-march-18-2025-scopesstudying-john-scopes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=141152","title":{"rendered":"AmericanStudies: March 18, 2025: ScopesStudying: John Scopes"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

[100 years
\nago this month, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Butler
\nAct<\/a>, prohibiting public school teachers from teaching evolution. So
\nthis week I\u2019ll AmericanStudy that law and the famous
\ntrial<\/a> it produced, leading up to a weekend post on current attacks on
\neducators.]<\/p>\n

On three
\ninteresting facts about the Tennessee
\nscience teacher<\/a> and football coach who became the center of one of America\u2019s
\nmost
\nfamous trials<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>Innocence?: I think it\u2019s become relatively
\nwell known (at least compared to many historical realities) that Scopes was
\nrecruited (by geologist
\nGeorge Rappleyea<\/a> and other scientists and businessmen in the town of Dayton
\nwhere Scopes taught) to stand trial for violating the Butler Act. But what I
\ndidn\u2019t realize until researching this series was that even by the letter of
\nthat restrictive law, Scopes might have been innocent\u2014it\u2019s true that the textbook
\nhe and all state biology teachers in that era were required to use, George
\nWilliam Hunter\u2019s Civic Biology<\/i><\/a>, included a chapter on evolution; but
\nScopes later admitted
\nto local reporter<\/a> William Kinsey Hutchinson that he had omitted that
\nchapter from his lessons. Hutchinson didn\u2019t publish his story until after the
\ntrial\u2019s verdict, or perhaps this famous trial would have ended differently. <\/span><\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>A Socialist Campaign: In any case, Scopes was
\nfound guilty on July 21, 1925, and his conviction was upheld
\nby the Tennessee Supreme Court<\/a> a year later (although they vacated his $100
\nfine because the judge, rather than the jury, had determined the amount). The
\ntrial and verdict would linger with Scopes for the rest of his life, only
\nbecoming somewhat more of a positive presence decades later as I\u2019ll highlight below.
\nBut of course they\u2019re not the whole story, and one distinct and particularly
\ninteresting detail is that in
\n1932 he ran<\/a> an at-large campaign for a U.S. House of Representatives seat
\nfrom Kentucky (his childhood home, to which he and his family had relocated
\nafter the trial) as a
\nSocialist Party candidate<\/a>. Probably wouldn\u2019t help his case with
\nconservative Tennessee neighbors if they knew that fact, but it makes clear
\nthat he wasn\u2019t just recruited or forced into political conversations. <\/span><\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>A Late-Life Embrace: Again, for a long time
\nScopes saw the trial and verdict as an albatross, but in the decade before his
\n1970 death he began to change his perspective. That shift is particularly clear
\nin a trio of 1960 events: attending the July U.S. premiere of the film<\/a>
\nInherit the Wind<\/i> (on which more in Thursday\u2019s post), telling the story
\nof the trial on an October
\nepisode of the TV game show To Tell the Truth<\/i><\/a>, and taking part in that
\nyear\u2019s celebrations of John
\nT. Scopes Day in Dayton<\/a>. Scopes would lean into those associations with the
\ntrial for the rest of his life, culminating in his emphasis on that story in
\nhis 1967 autobiography Center of the Storm: Memoirs
\nof John T. Scopes<\/a><\/i>\u2014the first edition of which, as you can see at that
\nhyperlink, features a monkey on the cover, natch. <\/span><\/p>\n

Next
\nScopes context tomorrow,<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben<\/span><\/p>\n

PS. What
\ndo you think? <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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