John T. Scopes

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George Washington Rappleyea (left) and John Thomas Scopes (right), Dayton, Tennessee, June 1925.

John Thomas Scopes (August 3, 1900 – October 21, 1970), a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee at the age of 24, was charged on May 25, 1925 with violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. He was in court in a case known as the Scopes Trial.[1]

Scopes was born and raised in Paducah, Kentucky, but as a teenager attended Danville High School in Danville, Illinois (Danville High was also the first school he taught at shortly before he moved to Dayton). Scopes was a member of the class of 1919 in Salem, Illinois, which is also William Jennings Bryan's home town. After he had gained a law degree at the University of Kentucky in 1924, Scopes moved to Dayton where he took a job as the Rhea County High School's football coach, and occasionally filled in as substitute teacher when regular members of staff were off work.

Scopes' involvement in the so-called Monkey Trial came about after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that it would finance a test case challenging the constitutionality of the Butler Act if they could find a Tennessee teacher willing to be put on trial for violating the statute.

A group of businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee, led by engineer and geologist George Rappleyea, saw this as an opportunity to get publicity for their town and approached Scopes. Rappleyea pointed out that while the Butler Act prohibited the teaching of evolution, the state required teachers to use the assigned textbook - Hunter's Civic Biology (1914) - which included a chapter on evolution. Rappleyea argued that teachers were essentially required to break the law. When asked about the test case Scopes was initially reluctant to get involved, but after some discussion he told the group gathered in Robinson's Drugstore, "If you can prove that I've taught evolution and that I can qualify as a defendant, then I'll be willing to stand trial."

By the time the trial had begun, the defense team included Clarence Darrow, Dudley Field Malone, John Neal, Arthur Garfield Hays and Frank McElwee. The prosecution team, led by Tom Stewart, included brothers Herbert and Sue Hicks, Wallace Haggard, and father and son pairings Ben and J. Gordon McKenzie and William Jennings Bryan and William Jennings Bryan Jr. Bryan had spoken at Scopes' high school commencement and remembered the defendant laughing while he was giving the address to the graduating class six years earlier. The judge refused to allow scientists to testify in Scopes' defense.

The case ended with a guilty verdict, and Scopes was fined $100, which Bryan and the ACLU offered to pay. The case was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court which found the Butler Act constitutional, but overturned Scopes conviction on a technicality; the judge had set the fine instead of the jury. The Butler Act remained until 1967 when it was repealed by the Tennessee legislature.

Scopes may have actually been innocent of the crime to which his name is inexorably linked. After the trial Scopes admitted to reporter William Kinsey Hutchinson "I didn't violate the law," explaining he had skipped the evolution lesson and his lawyers had coached his students to go on the stand; the Dayton businessmen had assumed he had violated the law. Hutchinson did not file his story until after the Scopes appeal was decided in 1927. Scopes also admitted the truth to the wife of the Modernist minister Charles Francis Potter. Scopes was not allowed to take the stand at his trial for fear he would reveal his ignorance and turned down a $50,000 offer to lecture on evolution on the vaudeville stage because he did not know enough about the subject.

After the trial, Scopes went to the University of Chicago, where he received a master's degree in geology. After that he was mainly employed by the oil industry, in both the United States and Venezuela. He died at the age of 70, probably from a stroke. He is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Paducah, Kentucky.

John Scopes wrote an autobiography entitled Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes. (Henry Holt & Company, Inc.—June 1967), ISBN 0-03-060340-4