Scopes Monkey Trial
...entials also include the realms of teaching at Harvard and Brown Universities. The various political, religious and social issues surrounding the Scopes debacle coincided and rested upon the unassuming shoulders of one John Thomas Scopes and were set into motion by Fundamentalists and Intellectualists alike. Representing the religious fundamentalists was the aforementioned William Jennings Bryan and his impressively large team of prosecutors. Clarence Darrow, handpicked by Scopes, represented the defense as an agnostic liberal. His defense team included another radical attorney and one lawyer associated with the American Civil Liberties Union. Scopes was thrown into the mix by agreeing to be a defendant for the ACLU. The ACLU ultimate goal was to overturn the Butler Act, which was enacted to “prohibit the teaching of evolution in the public schools of Tennessee.” The ACLU denounced this ‘monkey law’ and sought out Scopes by advertising in Tennessee newspapers. Scopes was a young, like science teacher at a local Dayton, TN high school. His relevance to the case was hardly noticeable. The radical agenda of Darrow and Bryan’s grandiose maneuvers were the real highlights of the trial. After picking the obligatory jurors on the first day, which included six Baptists, four Methodists, one from the Christian Church and one who admitted to not belonging to any Church, the trial officially began on the second day. The defense wanted to first attempt to immediately quash the Butler Act by declaring the law itself unconstitutional, which lasted until the fourth day. Despite Darrow’s convincing arguments about rescinding backwards in time, “…we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century, when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind” and the defense team’s successful interrogation of the legislature’s preference for the Bible, (Stewart) “We are not living in a heathen country, so how could it prefer the Bible to the Koran?” the state was still deemed eligible to control the public school system. Bryan’s main points included, “The teacher is an employee and receives a salary; employees take direction from their employers, and the teacher is no exception.” Bryan further cemented his case by maintaining that a teacher could have their own personal beliefs outside of the classroom, but it was the legislature’s job to regulate what is being taught in public schools and thus, a victory was heralded in favor of the Butler Act. With the essential point of the defense lost, experts were expected to then come in and expound upon the compatibility of evolutionary theory and religion. What the defense hoped to prove was that the Butler Act was essentially unintelligible. The fifth and sixth day decided against this proceeding. Bryan secured another victory by convincing the jury they did not need to be told by experts on how to apply the Butler law, and the case was more simplified than that. Bryan pronounced the evolution detains unimportant and the simple fact remained that Scopes had violated the Butler Act by teaching that “man descended from a lower order of animals.” On day six, Judge Raulston once again ruled in favor of the prosecution and no expert scientists or theologians were allowed to testify on the stand. The victory for the prosecution was in the bag, or so it would seem. Bryan surprisingly took the stand as an ‘expert witness’ on the Bible. The reasons behind Bryan’s agreeing to taking the witness stand can be speculated upon. Maybe partly due to guilt for denial of the real experts or maybe for his own pride, Bryan confidently stepped up only to get slammed down by Darrow. Every fundamental concept of the Bible that Darrow could fathom was tossed at Bryan who buckled under the questioning. Bryan even ...