A Century After the Scopes Trial, Cowards Still Rule in Tennessee

This spring the University of Tennessee at Knoxville marks the centennial of the Scopes “monkey trial,” the showdown over the teaching of Darwinian evolution held in Dayton in the summer of 1925. Through lectures and a fine campus performance of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play Inherit the Wind, this retrospective explores that infamous century-old debate over the place of science and religion in our schools. At the same time, this history shines light on our ongoing conflicts between the authority of science and the power of a legislative majority. Educational leaders in our state and around the country still face some of the fundamental challenges raised by the “trial of the century,” and the jury is still out.

As part of this centennial, visiting scholars have pointed out that the public’s image of what happened that sweltering summer has been distorted by Inherit the Wind, a hugely popular play and movie that was loosely based on the trial. When the play debuted in 1955, Lawrence and Lee adapted the historical event as a device for expressing Cold War anxieties over McCarthyism. The more complex issues raised by the Butler law and the Scopes trial are muted or ignored in the play, replaced by a stirring morality tale depicting the John Scopes character as a rebel intellectual harried by a small-town Tennessee mob of religious bigots.

Long before Inherit the Wind, this interpretation of the “monkey trial” was given florid expression by the reporter H.L. Mencken, who enjoyed a court-side seat and a national audience to mock the proceedings. When Scopes was duly convicted for violating the state law banning the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible,” Mencken warned that “It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic” — William Jennings Bryan, who was arguing for the prosecution — “rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law.”

Fair enough, as far as it goes. But translating the Scopes trial into a titanic battle between the progressive forces of science and the primitive mythology of Genesis obscures many of the actual facts of the case, and the legal (and theological) issues at stake. When John Scopes’s lawyer, the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, tried to call scientific experts to the stand to explain and vindicate Darwin’s theory to the jury, the judge sustained the prosecution’s objection. The jury trial was no place to rule on the validity of evolutionary theory; rather, the humbler legal question at hand was whether Scopes had broken state law by offering his students a version of human origins incompatible with Genesis.

Muddying those waters, it was unclear that John Scopes, a math teacher and football coach, had actually taught human evolution when he filled in as a substitute biology teacher; he later admitted that he could not be sure that he had. If guilty, his crime involved reading out of Hunter’s Civic Biology, a textbook approved for use by the state. Listen closely and you can hear echoes of our own bitter controversies over school curriculum. A century later, we still have politicians pandering to a populist suspicion of scientific “elites” and school-board members who vow to protect the young from the corrupting influence of unsettling books. Off the job, Scopes could think whatever he wanted about Genesis. As a state employee, he was obliged to defend the timeworn biology of Moses that had been mandated by state law.

Though evolutionary theory is now foundational to the work of university scientists, it still enjoys only a precarious hold on Tennessee’s public secondary schools. In my informal surveys of the bright students in my history classes at UT, most report that they learned little or nothing about Darwin or his theory in their high-school biology classes. While Tennessee finally repealed the Butler Act in 1967, the legislature replaced this in 2012 with a law authorizing public schools to “teach the controversy,” giving an opening to “creation science” that has no place in a modern biology class. Perhaps understandably, many of our state’s high-school science teachers have decided, instead, to “skip the controversy.”

While Mencken’s mockery and Inherit the Wind’s Cold War morality tale have defined the meaning of the Scopes trial for most of us, another journalist in Dayton that summer offered a take on the proceedings that speaks more directly to the present state of Knoxville and its university. Joseph Wood Krutch, a graduate of UT who had a growing national reputation as a drama critic, came to East Tennessee to report on the trial for The Nation. Born and raised in Knoxville, Krutch was far more forgiving of Dayton’s residents than Mencken. “If some of its inhabitants turn to the law to protect their children against the teaching of a dangerous theory,” he wrote, “it is with a simplicity of mind which has no conception of the questions of academic freedom involved.” However ill-prepared they might be to resolve the modern conflicts between science and religion, free inquiry versus the state control of education, they earnestly debated these questions in the local drugstore and on the courthouse lawn.

Krutch could not say the same about the state’s “representatives of science, education, and enlightenment,” who regretted the law but chose only to “dodge.” In Tennessee, he declared, “Cowards Rule.” “At Dayton no one is afraid to tell me what he thinks. But when I go to Knoxville, seat of the State University … I enter a different world.” Harcourt Morgan, UT’s president at the time, a member of the Board of Trustees, and the editor of the city’s largest newspaper, all “whispered” to Krutch that of course they opposed the Butler law, but dared not say so on the record. As Krutch pointed out, most state legislators who voted for the measure, and Gov. Austin Peay who signed it into law, considered it a sop to fundamentalist voters, but never expected it to be enforced.

On the UT campus, the administration assured faculty that they could still teach evolution, just quietly. President Morgan, a trained scientist, “ought to know better,” Krutch charged, but “can think of no plan more courageous than to weakly disobey the law when necessary, while pretending to the legislature that he approves of its acts. ... Concerned above all else with his precious appropriations, it never occurs to him to ask whether his chief duty might not possibly be something other than wangling money from a cowardly legislature.”

Here is a version of the issues at stake in the Scopes trial that reaches across the decades to speak to our own time. It is a fundamental disagreement about the proper goal of any institution of higher education. Administrators, entrusted with the cultivation and expansion of a large and expensive institution, see the campus as a set of buildings and programs, budgets, research projects, and blueprints for the future. Many of the faculty see things the same way, their pursuit of knowledge untouched by controversy; better parking, good students, and the occasional pay raise are sufficient to keep them doing their useful work.

But others teach in fields that sometimes rub against the grain of public opinion. Like Joseph Wood Krutch a century ago, they consider the university’s budget to be a means to a different end: not new buildings but the pursuit of new knowledge, even at the risk of upsetting the status quo.

Today, professors on our campus fear not when they speak about evolutionary theory. But in the recent past, university administrators anxious to avoid the wrath of our legislature have continued the practice of “dodging.” When Gov. Bill Lee declared in a 2022 speech that “colleges and universities have become centers of anti-American thought,” campus leaders did not defend their own faculty but gratefully accepted many millions of state tax dollars to establish a new “civics institute” that the governor hopes will promote “American exceptionalism.” A 2023 state law requires public universities to take “corrective action” if a program or faculty member is accused of promoting “divisive concepts,” a policy that targets free discussion of the problem of systemic racism. In response, the university dropped the term “diversity” from many programs, camouflaging a sincere commitment to these values by switching to the more anodyne goal of “access.”

Campus leaders assure the faculty that they value diversity and support academic freedom to explore issues of social justice, racial inequities, and sexual orientation. But they have urged, and sometimes insisted, that this be done without rousing the ire of our lawmakers.

The success of this strategy can’t be denied by anyone who has seen the massive building projects that are transforming the Knoxville campus. The “wangling” has worked, benefiting those who work at UT, and the Tennessee families they serve, in many ways. But the aggressive moves by the new federal administration to ferret out any research that offends MAGA orthodoxy, to undermine public confidence in scientific expertise, and to demonize university faculty as “radical, leftist lunatics” will put administrators to a soul-searching stress test. We will see if they will meet that challenge, in Mencken’s words, “too timorously and too late.”