COINCIDENCE OR EVOLUTION

WHAT PRICE FREEDOM OF SPEECH ?

John Washington Butler………………...…………... Austin Peay

On the 13th March 1925 the Tennessee General Assembly approved a bill prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signed the measure on the 21st. The legislation was referred to as the Butler Act, was introduced into the State House of Representatives by John Washington Butler on 21st January 1925, passed by the House on the 28th January by a vote of 71 to 5, approved by the Senate on 13 March 1925 by a vote of 24 to 6 effectively making it law and a week later it was signed off by the Governor. This measure evolved into law in the space of 8 weeks:

"That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible , and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

A number of issues arise from this unseemly haste. Governor Peay was born in Kentucky, the son of a Confederate Cavalryman, on 1st June 1876. He attended University in Virginia and Kentucky, became a lawyer and had a practice in Tennessee. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1901. He was eventually elected Governor in 1922. Indeed he was elected for three terms as governor. He was a man who claimed to believe in education. There is a substantial University in Tennessee which bears his name. When he was re-elected in 1924, pushing through a tobacco tax for extra state funds he asked at a public hearing "Who will speak tonight for the children in our rural country, hungering for an education? Who will speak for those sad and mindless waifs scattered throughout our state and destitute of hope and home?…Who will voice the humanity and aspirations of Tennessee tonight?" And yet in March of 1925 he signed the Butler Act.

State Representative Butler, was a farmer and head of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association. He pushed through the Bill very effectively. In response to the bill the American Civil Liberties Union financed a test case where John Scopes, a Tennessee high school teacher, intentionally violated the Act. He was charged on the 5th May 1925 with teaching evolution from a chapter in a textbook that showed ideas developed from Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

John Scopes

The two sides brought in the biggest names in the nation, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defence. The trial was followed on radio transmissions throughout the United States

Darrow……….……..Darrow and Bryan having a chat during the trial……………...………Bryan

Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality and he was never brought back to trial.

The whole incident was turned into a play in 1955 Inherit the Wind, co-written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, and made into a very successful motion picture by Stanley Kramer in 1960 staring Spencer Tracy and Frederic March. Names of the participants were changed but a lot of the dialogue was taken from the trial.

Governor Peay died in 1927 of a cerebral haemorrhage age 51. John Butler died in 1952 aged 77. Scopes died aged 70 in 1970.

The trial ended on the 21st July 1925 and William Jennings Bryan died five days later on the 26th July 1925, age 65. It is hard to believe that he was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He stood three times as candidate for President of the United States, served in Congress and was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. How bizarre is the mind of man?

As for Clarence Darrow, he died on the 13th March 1938 at the age of 80 on the 13th anniversary of the Butler Act being passed by the Tennessee Senate. The act was not repealed until 1st September 1967. For 42 years it was against the law to teach evolution in Tennessee schools.

Clarence Darrow was a pretty impressive advocate, even though on this occasion he lost the case. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the most celebrated Lawyers in the United States. Although he was never elected to public office, he was involved in politics and some of the most notorious cases in America. He represented a number of Union leaders, as well as defendants in what became high profile criminal cases, notably Leopold and Loeb (which inspired another play and films by Alfred Hitchcock, Rope, and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion).

Clarence Darrow (18 April 1857 - 13 March 1938)