JOHN SCOPES

(1900 - 1970)
POLITICS ::: EVOLUTION ::: MUCHOPLAPKA :::

In 1925, the young Tennessee teacher was put on trial for violating the Butler Act, which prohibited public-school teachers from teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution. Clarence Darrow joined the defense. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution. The resulting spectacle became known as the Scopes “Monkey Trial”—and Chicago station WGN carried it across America in the first live radio broadcast of a trial in U.S. history.

Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. Afterward, he enrolled at the University of Chicago and earned a master’s degree in geology. That brings the Monkey Trial directly into the Mucholapka landscape: Chicago’s zoology department had been built by Charles Otis Whitman, founding director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Whitman’s successor, Frank Lillie, led both institutions and married Frances Crane, sister of Charles Richard Crane.

The easy version is science defeating religious ignorance. The truth is more complicated. Lillie and other respected biologists also participated in the American eugenics movement, demonstrating that scientific authority could be distorted into biological hierarchy and social control. The Scopes Trial left America with a question much larger than evolution: Who gets to define truth—and what happens when that definition becomes law?