Berkshire County — Nearly 100 years ago, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested and accused of violating the state’s Butler Act. The act, which was signed into law by Gov. Austin Peay in March 1925, made it illegal for teachers to teach their students human evolution.
As per the act:
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.
Any teacher found guilty of the violation of this Act, Shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than $100 nor more than $500 for each offense.
Not long after the act was signed, the American Civil Liberties Union brought a test case against it. The ACLU recruited Scopes—a chemistry, physics, algebra, and substitute biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tenn.—to be part of the test case.
The state of Tennessee charged Scopes in May 1925 after he taught evolution from the textbook “Civic Biology: Presented in Problems,” written in 1914 by George William Hunter.
The trial, known over time as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was broadcast on radio live throughout America, but the broadcasts were never recorded.
Scopes was eventually found guilty and fined $100.
The Butler Act was repealed by the state of Tennessee in 1967, 42 years after its passage.
The legacy of the trial, along with its impacts on American education, are all part of Berkshire OLLI’s six-week course on the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Berkshire County attorney and teacher Douglas Mishkin will lead the course. “I’ve been passionate about the Scopes Trial ever since I was a kid,” Mishkin told The Berkshire Edge. “When I taught this course for the first time in 2019, I spent a year researching it. But it turns out that, while the trial was broadcast on the radio throughout America, there is no audio recording of it. I would give my right arm to hear the audio recording of the voices in the courtroom.”
Mishkin said that the Scopes Trial’s legacy endures because it pitted science against religion and covered issues surrounding religion in public schools and censorship of textbooks and school curricula. “While there were fights about all of this 100 years ago, it’s as if the case was ripped from today’s headlines,” Mishkin said. “We have all of these issues 100 years later because we still have fundamental American issues about them.”
Pastor John Nelson, who serves the Congregational Church of Salisbury, Conn., and is a friend of Mishkin, said that the U.S. has seen a resurgence of religious fundamentalism in recent years, which has been used as a tool against intellectual framework.
“People are also making use of what was once a biblical theological movement as a tool for organizing political power, which is dangerous,” said Pastor Nelson. “It’s worth talking about where this all comes from because there is a real and present danger. Fundamentalism can be used as a tool that is in direct competition with other forms of faith, practice, and intellectual query. That is of really dire significance right now.”
The 1955 play “Inherit the Wind” and the 1960 movie adaption present a fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial. “It’s a terrific movie, but if we are all going to hear about the Scopes Monkey Trial, I think we ought to know what happened,” Mishkin said. “When you create fiction out of something that happened, you oversimplify out of necessity, and you have to change things and make some things up. What happened at the trial is so much more interesting than the movie and play.”
Mishkin emphasized that the legacy of the trial “is still continuing on in front of our eyes.”
“State governments have banned the teachings of critical race theory,” Mishkin said. “Some people say that if you teach this stuff, you’ll make white students feel bad about being white. As a result, they simply teach incomplete versions of what they call American history. That is a descendant of the attempts that were made in Tennessee to ban the teachings of evolution. My point of view about this is that we’re not just continuing to fight the Scopes Monkey Trial, we are losing it.”
Mishkin’s six-part course “The Scopes Monkey Trial 100 Years Later: What Happened Then and Why Should We Care Now?” will be taught both in person and via Zoom every Tuesday starting on April 1 at 9:30 a.m.
On Monday, May 12, at 7 p.m., Mishkin will interview via Zoom writer Edward Larson, author of “Edward J. Larson’s Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.”
Click here for more information about Mishkin’s course.
Click here for more information about the May 12 event.
