Two

THE PATH TO JOHN SCOPES

Had we sought to find the defendant to present the issue, we could not have improved upon Scopes.

—Arthur Garfield Hays, one of John Scopes’s defenders

John Thomas Scopes was born on August 3, 1900, on a farm in Paducah, Kentucky. He was the youngest of five children, and the only son, of Thomas and Mary Scopes. By the time he was 16, Scopes was living in Salem, Illinois, where he graduated from Salem High School in 1919. His school’s convocation speaker was populist politician William Jennings Bryan. Six years later, Scopes and Bryan would meet again during Scopes’s famous trial.

In 1924, Scopes earned a law degree (with a minor in geology) from the University of Kentucky and accepted a job at Rhea Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes coached sports and taught math and science for $150 per month. Scopes was not hostile to religion, nor was he overly religious; as he noted, “I don’t know if I’m a Christian . . . but I believe in God.” While in Dayton, Scopes attended a Presbyterian church, but later admitted that he did so only to meet girls. He enjoyed teaching but bristled at governmental interference in the classroom because “once you introduce the power of the state—telling you what you can and cannot do—you’ve become involved in propaganda.”

In April 1925, William F. Ferguson—the high school’s biology teacher—was sick, and John Scopes took over his class for two weeks. According to his students, Scopes taught evolution and assigned the evolution chapter of the class textbook. Although he knew relatively little about evolution, Scopes accepted it because he considered it “the only plausible explanation of man’s long and tortuous journey to his resent physical and mental development.” Three months later, some of these students’ testimonies became part of the prosecution’s case against Scopes.

When Scopes began teaching in Dayton, the area’s economy was struggling. In May 1925, a group of Dayton businessmen meeting at a local drugstore wondered if they could stimulate the area’s fortunes by staging a “show trial” to test Tennessee’s newly passed law banning the teaching of human evolution. They first had to find a defendant. Ferguson refused to get involved, so the businessmen shifted their attention to Scopes. They summoned Scopes from a tennis match to the drugstore; after he agreed to help the group by standing trial, Scopes returned to his tennis match. Scopes expected to be convicted, but he believed “the fine mess I got myself into” was “important for everyone in the country.”

Roger Nash Baldwin was the first executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a group chartered “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” When Baldwin’s secretary showed him a short newspaper article describing Tennessee’s passage of the Butler Act, Baldwin began searching for a defendant there to challenge the law and to show that “a teacher may tell the truth without being thrown in jail.” The Scopes Trial, on which the ACLU spent $8,993.01, was the group’s first major trial. (ACLU.)

On page 5 of the May 4, 1925, issue of Chattanooga’s Daily Times newspaper, an article titled “Plan Assault on State Law on Evolution” (right) caught the eye of Dayton engineer George “Rapp” Rappleyea. The next day, Rappleyea took the newspaper to the drugstore owned by F.E. “Doc” Robinson—often called “The Hustling Druggist” for his community activism. There, Rappleyea, Robinson, and other local businessmen conceived the idea of a trial to boost Dayton’s struggling economy. (Dean Wilson.)

The diminutive George “Rapp” Rappleyea (left) was an engineer who moved to Dayton in 1922 to coordinate the shutdown and sale of the failing Cumberland Coal and Iron Company. This company, which in 1925 consisted of six mines and 400 employees, was all that remained of the once-thriving Dayton Coal and Iron Company. By most accounts, Rappleyea was the lead instigator at the meeting at Robinson’s Drug Store on May 5 where the idea for the Scopes Trial originated. After that meeting, Rappleyea signed the complaint that led to John Scopes’s arrest for violating the Butler Act. (BC.)

By the late 1800s, the Dayton Coal and Iron Company (DCIC)—whose smokestacks are visible near the center of this photograph—was a primary economic engine of the Dayton area. Indeed, within the five years after DCIC began operations in the early 1880s, Dayton’s population had increased from 300 to 2,700, and DCIC became one of the largest industrial developments in the South. In 1913, however, DCIC failed, after which the company began liquidation. By 1925, when the Scopes Trial started, Dayton’s population had shrunk to about 1,800 people, many of whom were employed at Cumberland Iron and Coal Company, managed by George Rappleyea; this company was the remains of DCIC. The photograph above was taken from Sentinel Heights, with a view looking southwest toward Dayton. For scale, the smokestacks were nearly 200 feet high. (Both, UTK.)

The declining fortunes of the coal and iron business played a critical role in the Scopes Trial. DCIC had been incorporated (above) in 1884 by Titus Salt and other English investors and by 1895 provided hundreds of jobs in the Dayton area. However, by 1910, the company was struggling and the area’s economy was in trouble. This prompted local businessmen—led by mining executive George Rappleyea—to search for ways to improve the area’s economy. In early May, Rappleyea and others met at the F.E. Robinson Company (commonly known as Robinson’s Drug Store) and hatched their plan for stimulating Dayton’s economy: a trial that soon became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Robinson’s store (below), along with the 35-room Hotel Aqua next door, was a center of activity during the Scopes Trial. (Above, Randy Moore; below, SI Image No. SIA 2008-1102.)

Robinson had the exclusive concession to sell textbooks used at Rhea Central High School, which were displayed at the rear of his drugstore. One of those books, George Hunter’s A Civic Biology, was used by John Scopes and became a focus of attention during Scopes’s famous trial. (RCHGS.)

On May 5, 1925, Rappleyea and other Dayton businessmen met around this small table in Robinson’s Drug Store to discuss how a trial to test the newly passed Butler Act could stimulate Dayton’s economy. In this photograph, from left to right, mining engineer and trial instigator George Rappleyea poses with Walter White (superintendent of Rhea County Schools), druggist F.E. Robinson (standing), and Clay D. Green, White’s assistant and a teacher who worked with Scopes. (BC.)

After the high school’s regular biology teacher refused to get involved in the proposed trial, the trial’s instigators shifted their focus to the school’s science teacher and coach—John Scopes, who had been a substitute teacher in the biology class earlier that year. The instigators sent two students to find Scopes, who was playing tennis at the high school. After being asked by druggist and school board president F.E. Robinson if he would help out the town by standing for a test case, Scopes agreed and returned to his tennis match. When Scopes was later arrested, his case began; as Scopes noted, “I thought I’d lose my job, [but that] was nothing to lose.” In this photograph, Scopes (right) discusses his predicament with Rhea County sheriff Robert “Bluch” Harris (left) in front of Robinson’s Drug Store. (LC.)

Rhea Central High School hired John Scopes for $150 per month to teach math and science, and to coach football, basketball, and baseball during the 1924–1925 school year. This was Scopes’s first and only year to work at the school. The popular Scopes, who considered coaching to be the most important part of his job, allegedly taught evolution when he substituted for the regular biology teacher in April 1925. The school was only three blocks from the Rhea County Courthouse, where Scopes would stand trial. (LC.)

John Scopes worked at Rhea Central High School, pictured above, which had opened in 1906 as Dayton’s first public high school. The photograph below, taken in the summer of 1924, shows Scopes’s football team. From left to right are (first row) Arch Shalton, Charles Stokley, Jack Hudson, C.L. Locke, and Dean Norman; (second row) Charles Hagler, Austin Tallent, Verdman Wells, Grady Purser, and Clair Elsea; (third row) John Scopes (coach), Henry Jones, Luther Welch, Edwin Williamson, and Carroll Tallent; (fourth row) Crawford Purser. Crawford Purser and Locke, who attended Scopes’s trial every day (they usually sat in a windowsill of the courtroom, sometimes with WGN radio announcer Quin Ryan), were playing tennis with Scopes behind the high school when he was summoned to Robinson’s Drug Store. (Both, BC.)

When W.F. Ferguson, the regular biology teacher and school principal, got sick in late April 1925, John Scopes took over his class for two weeks. At the end of that time, Scopes gave an exam featuring questions about biology and major groups of living organisms (e.g., question 2 was about insects, and question 3 was about flowering plants). Scopes’s exam included no questions that were specifically about evolution. (UTK.)