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The following is part one of a four-part series going over the 100^th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, courtesy of the Nashville Banner. To read the full story, visit the Nashville Banner’s website, and sign up for the Nashville Banner’s newsletters.

What occurred a century ago this month in the courtroom of the Rhea County Courthouse refuses to be forgotten. The utterance of a name — Scopes — is a reminder of those two torrid weeks in July 1925 when the world’s eyes were on Dayton.

Through the decades, The State of Tennessee vs John T. Scopes assumed the mantle of “the most famous trial in America.” Academics explored the subject in thousands of theses and dissertations. Hundreds of nonfiction writers and documentarians plumbed trial transcripts and personal records of the trial’s major (and minor) participants to craft explanatory narratives. Broadway and Hollywood paid tribute with Inherit the Wind, which was based on the events of that July.

Why should 21st-century Americans pause to ponder a judicial proceeding where the principals have moldered in their graves since long before the end of the last millennium?

Consider these questions: What should children be taught in school? Can science be trusted? Does government have the right to dictate cultural values? What does the Constitution mean by freedom of religion? By freedom of speech? Who defines the future in a democratic society?

If you think these are battle lines drawn by 2025 society, you would be correct, but the colliding fault lines that are fracturing today’s electorate were rumbling in 1925 and the shaking hasn’t abated.

A century ago, the country was still reeling from the Spanish influenza pandemic and World War I, even as the populace was becoming accustomed to the wonder and ubiquity of mass communication via radio. In the current age, the USA is fresh from two decades of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq and a novel coronavirus that killed hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, Americans are bombarded moment-to-moment with algorithmically driven information (and misinformation) that feeds high levels of anxiety.

Both eras represent times of immense change. Historian Brenda Wineapple, who wrote a 2024 book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, described the frazzled ethos of 1925 America this way: “The old order was indeed changing, and to many Americans change was defined as capricious, unpredictable, and if not stopped, wholly sinister.” In the face of changes that futurists predict — with AI and its attendant disruption standing front and center — it’s easy to apply that same line to 2025.

What happened in Dayton so long ago wasn’t just “monkey business.” It could be interpreted as a premonition for this modern age. As William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Ostensibly, the trial was convened to determine if Scopes, a 24-year-old teacher at Dayton High School, taught evolution in defiance of the Butler Act, which was signed into state law earlier in the year. The case quickly evolved (no pun intended) into a media-fueled frenzy, featuring the first trial broadcast live on radio. The press corps swelled to more than 150 newspaper reporters and photographers. A simple question about one teacher’s actions turned into a battle royale, where figurative dividing lines were drawn in the mountain loam; where celebrity lawyers — Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan — pitted modernity against old-time religion.

And the attentive world was pointedly asked to choose a side … if they could.  

Throw in a sideshow of street corner preachers bellowing fire and brimstone, end-of-the world prophets holding signs declaring impending doom, opportunistic vendors hawking lemonade, hot dogs, ice cream, anti-evolution books and trial souvenirs, thousands of curious spectators milling about and a suit-wearing chimpanzee named Jo Mendi strolling the tree-lined sidewalks and you have an overview of the Scopes trial of 1925.

But let’s not get ahead of the story.

A visit to ground zero of the 1925 anti-evolution bill requires a trip off the beaten path to Macon County. There, on a 75-acre farm three miles from the county seat of Lafayette, John Washington Butler lived in a white clapboard home his grandfather built in the late 1800s.

Butler, who was 49 in the summer of the Scopes trial, was a farmer and respected citizen. He and his wife, Nola, short for Magnolia, raised two daughters and three sons. For several years in young adulthood, Butler served as a school teacher. In those days, classes were only held for three or four months during the winter so that crops could be tended. Although he left teaching, concern for youth, and their future, remained a driving force in Butler’s life.

In the summer of 1922, friends urged him to run for state representative and Butler was elected that fall to represent his home county as well as Trousdale and Sumner counties. In 1927, he moved to the Senate. Although serving for only a trio of two-year terms — 1923 to 1929 — he made his mark on history.

Butler was a tall man, in the range of six feet, with broad shoulders, large hands and a firm jaw that always seemed to be locked in position. In the many photographs taken of him in 1925, he never cracked a smile.

That’s not to say he wasn’t friendly. Several weeks before the court proceedings, a Nashville Banner reporter spent the day with Butler on his farm. “He is not the hard-faced, unrelenting zealot of popular conception. To the contrary, he is a good-natured, companionable, jovial fellow,” the reporter observed in a thousand-word piece that took up most of an inside page.

Regarding evolution, however, Butler found nothing to smile about. “I look upon that theory as infidelity and opposed to the Bible,” he explained to the reporter. Butler made clear he could not accept that “man is descended from the lower order of animals.”

The state representative’s journey of faith did not stray from the precepts he was taught as a child at nearby Testament Primitive Baptist Church. “I believe in the Bible just as it was printed and that it was written with the divine inspiration of God,” he told the reporter, adding that although he didn’t “claim to understand all of it,” Butler accepted the holy book as “true, every word of it.”

Including the timetable of creation in Genesis.

Butler acknowledged to the New York Times in a 1925 interview that he “didn’t know anything about evolution” when he submitted his anti-evolution bill for consideration. The impetus for the legislation came from newspaper reports — Butler was an avid reader of newspapers — that told of students returning from college changed by their acquaintance with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

“Boys and girls were returning home from school and telling their mothers and fathers that the Bible was all nonsense,” he told the Times. “I didn’t think that was right.” Butler contemplated the matter for several months before deciding the state of Tennessee should intervene.

On a cold January day before the legislature convened for its 1925 session, Butler reached for a pencil and paper and settled into a chair in front of a blazing fire at his home. He was determined to write an anti-evolution bill that would prohibit the teaching of evolutionary thought in all public schools, including universities. Just as important to him was a second provision: to prohibit the teaching of any theory “that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.”

 “I wrote the bill myself, making six or seven trials at it before it suited me,” he told the Banner reporter. Butler said the bill’s language was of his own creation, with no outside help given. “I have heard it said that somebody was ‘back of me’ in the introduction of the bill, but that is not correct.”

On Tuesday, January 27, the Butler Act received overwhelming acceptance in the lower chamber of the General Assembly, less than a week after the measure was introduced.

The Senate, on the other hand, took its time. After being rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the bill appeared beyond resuscitation, but an external force, namely the charismatic evangelist Billy Sunday, revived it. In a series of revival meetings throughout February in Memphis, the fundamentalist attracted tens of thousands who were exhorted to resist the ways of the world and to turn to God. On several occasions, Sunday fixed evolution in his sights, bellowing to the faithful that “education today is chained to the devil’s throne.” He praised the Tennessee House of Representatives for taking “action against that God forsaken gang of evolutionary cutthroats.” The crowd roared with applause and shouts of “Amen.”

The Tennessee Senate minded their cues received from Bluff City. The “evolution bill” was returned to committee, where it was promptly referred to the full body for a vote on March 13, a Friday. A chorus of hecklers, mostly Vanderbilt students, filled the galleries to shout their opposition, but the measure was handily approved.

Gov. Austin Peay signed the Butler Act without reservation. He expressed confidence that “the law will never be applied.” State Rep. Butler believed the same. He assumed “everybody would abide by it (and) we wouldn’t hear any more about evolution in Tennessee.”

John Thomas Scopes, the amiable science teacher and football coach at Dayton High, was charged with teaching evolution about six weeks later.

The game was on.

It should be stated that Scopes may have never mentioned “evolution” to Dayton High students, much less taught the controversial science behind the word. Yet, as incongruent as it sounds, he agreed to say he did, was charged and, soon enough, his name and photo appeared in newspapers from Poughkeepsie to Sacramento.

That happened because of the confluence of specific actors and factors.

After the Butler Act was signed by Gov. Peay in March 1925, the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union decided to test the law’s constitutionality. The organization circulated an appeal in newspapers for a biology teacher who had taught evolution. On Monday, May 4, the Chattanooga Times published the ACLU’s notice. A representative of the New York-based organization stated the “law strikes so serious a blow at scientific teaching that we cannot let the issue rest until it has been passed upon by the highest courts.”

It was the Chattanooga paper, which circulated in Dayton, that caught the attention of George Washington Rappleyea, a civil engineer with expertise in metallurgy. He had moved to Dayton, his wife’s hometown, to manage the faltering Cumberland Coal and Iron Co. At one time, the company had been the economic engine of the county, but by 1925, the enterprise was hampered by outdated equipment and reduced output from its mine. Effects of the company’s downturn rippled through the community.

Rappleyea (rhymes with “apple-yay”) was an improbable instigator of the Scopes affair. He was a transplanted New York City native. He didn’t sound like other Daytonians nor look like them — short, swarthy, with a head of bushy dark hair. Despite these differences, the town accepted him. He was active in the Methodist church, a member of community clubs and was friendly with the town’s movers and shakers.

On May 5 Rappleyea entered Robinson’s Drug Store with the Chattanooga Times in hand. There, Frank Earl Robinson, owner of the store, and other members of the town’s Progressive Club frequently gathered to confab. Rappleyea broached his big idea of using a legal proceeding on evolution to draw thousands of visitors to Dayton. The attention, he predicted, might linger beyond the hoopla of the trial. Those present liked the sound of it.

For the role of the evolution-teaching instructor, Rappleyea suggested Scopes. According to one account, a high school student was at the store’s soda fountain and Walter White, the school superintendent, sent the young man to fetch Scopes.

When Scopes answered his summons to the drug store, he faced a contingent of the town’s leading businessmen and his boss. The group was engrossed in a dispute about evolution. Rappelyea directed the attention to Scopes, asking if biology could be taught without mentioning evolution. No, the teacher answered.

To prove his point, he moved to a shelf where state-approved textbooks were displayed (students had to buy their own in 1925) and pulled a volume titled Civic Biology by George Hunter. He noted the book’s “Evolution” section.

That’s when Rappleyea sprang the trap. He explained the ACLU’s offer to fund a test case and asked Scopes if he would be the bait. The blue-eyed young man, a year out of college from the University of Kentucky and in his first year of employment at Dayton High, was not eager to accept. Nor did he think his teaching experience was applicable. Scopes didn’t normally teach biology, but he had been called to substitute earlier in the semester when the regular teacher was absent due to illness.

And, as stated earlier, Scopes wasn’t sure evolution came up in class.   

No one present, save the teacher, saw that as a problem.

Everyone warmed to Rappleyea’s plan. Before the group dismissed, Scopes, who supported the teaching of evolution, also agreed to participate. He would later regret being thrust into the spotlight, but on that spring day in 1925, everyone gathered around the café tables at the drug store was of one accord: the evolution debate would be brought to Dayton.

Leon Alligood is a retired MTSU journalism professor. For 30 years before joining academia, he was a reporter, most of that time at The Nashville Banner and The Tennessean. He is the co-author (with Kathy Bingham Turner) of “Boss Brooks: A True Story of Fraud, Family and Forgiveness from Tennessee to Texas” which will be published by the University of Tennessee Press in November.