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The Scopes Trial, which was also known as ‘The Monkey Trial’ or The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes, was a very popular legal dispute in court that was between the theory of evolution and creationism, and played a major role which shaped the 1920’s. What was just as popular was the interpretation of the case, if not more than the actual result of the dispute. This case received world-wide attention and the media coverage produced many different opinions world-wide. A major factor of why the Scopes trial had received so much attention in such an insignificant town was because of the stage the trial was played out on. The Butler Act is what made the Scopes trial possible. The Butler Act stated that it was prohibited for public schools in Tennessee from teaching evolution, or to go against the words of the Biblical story of creationism. The Act made it ‘unlawful for any teacher in 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 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 described from lower order of animals’.
The Act was put in place in 1925 with almost no opposition in Tennessee’s Congress, if the law were to be broken, the offender would be placed a fine of $100 to $500. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was a union who defended every person’s constitutional rights, offered to defend anyone in court who was accused of teaching evolution in schools. This was to of no shock to the people of Tennessee. ‘A fellow legislator estimated at the time that no fewer than 95 percent of all Tennesseans opposed the teaching of evolution’. Howeve...
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...s. The scopes case was fought on two levels which have still continued to be discussed today. The first with legal and political questions about what was allowed and what was not allowed to be taught in public schools and who was to make the decision, but other than these arguments, there was clearly another level. Both Bryan and Darrow thought that the theory of evolution and religion did conflict and that one had to be right and one had to be wrong. America, along with the rest of the world, began to decide their take on the Scopes Trial. ‘Most southern Baptists saw the trial as a morality play in which goodness had vanquished evil’. There was great offense taken by the fundamentalists when they were compared to a lower species of animals by the evolution theory. The theme good vs. evil was the point of the trial for Fundamentalists where evolution was the evil.
... But the damage was already done, the trial wasn’t truly about if Scopes was guilty but ultimately the role of religion in society especially schools, and the Bryan’s mistake at the trial left the argument wide open. This issue is still being addressed to this day, no one knows if their is a right answer and it still causes tensions between the conservatives and liberals of society.
The “Monkey Trial” in 1925 was one of the most famous clashes in history between the Bible and evolution. The concept of the play was based on the Scopes Trial, but characters, actions, and words were altered. During the trial, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow went to court to try John Scopes for illegally teaching evolution, causing major complications in Dayton, Tennessee. In the play Inherit the Wind, the character, Henry Drummond, parallels his real-life counterpart, Clarence Darrow, through ¬his appearance, beliefs, and actions.
Firstly, in the town of Hillsboro teaching the theory of evolution to students was strictly against the law. Bert Cates was in opposition to this idea and, he believed that every student had the right to know about the Origin of species. Teaching the theory of evolution was against the law because it contradicted the teachings
American Civil Liberties Union discovered the law, they put out a press release requesting the cooperation of a Tennessee teacher in a “friendly test case” of the law (DeCamp 8). Dayton resident George Rappleyea and some friends came up with the idea to have the case in Dayton and decided to ask John Scopes to be the teacher to test the law.
Put in place in 1925 with virtually no opposition in Tennessee’s Congress, breaking the law resulted in a misdemeanor offense with a fine of $100 to $500. The American Civil Liberties Union – a union that fought for every citizen’s constitutional rights – offered to defend anyone in court who was accused of teaching evolution. The bill was no shock to Tennesseans, “A fellow legislator estimated at the time that no fewer than 95 percent of all Tennesseans oppos...
The Scopes trial, writes Edward Larson, to most Americans embodies “the timeless debate over science and religion.” (265) Written by historians, judges, and playwrights, the history of the Scopes trial has caused Americans to perceive “the relationship between science and religion in . . . simple terms: either Darwin or the Bible was true.” (265) The road to the trial began when Tennessee passed the Butler Act in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in secondary schools. It was only a matter of time before a young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, prompted by the ACLU tested the law. Spectators and newspapermen came from allover to witness whether science or religion would win the day. Yet below all the hype, the trial had a deeper meaning. In Summer for the Gods, Edward Larson argues that a more significant battle was waged between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy. Even though the rural fundamentalist majority legally banned teaching evolution in 1925, the rise of modernism, started long before the trial, raised a critical question for rural Americans: should they publicly impose their religious beliefs upon individuals who believed more and more in science.
Primarily, Bert Cates, a 10th grade teacher, struggles to obtain his right to have an open-mind, and encourages others to do so. The defendant, simply tries to teach a lesson in his Hunter’s Civic Biology, but while doing so is hastily over charged by the bigots of Hillsboro, Tennessee. As he explains himself to a fellow school teacher: “I did it because...I had the book in my hand...and read to my sophomore science class chapter 17, Darwin’s Origin of Species...All it says is that man wasn’t stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot; that living things come from a long miracle, it didn’t just happen in seven days”. It seems odd, or even bizarre that this premise is so hard to accept in Hillsboro. All in all, Cates is merely opening another aspect to the beginning of time.
The teacher John Scopes was only teaching evolution in a relation to science evolution. The Scopes trial was the first occurrence of a teacher teaching evolution in their classroom. “The John Thomas Scopes trial checked the influence of Fundamentalism in Public Education ( John.)” The trial started because John Scopes broke the Butler law. “In 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler law which forbade the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in any public school or university(The Monkey
The 1920’s were a time of change. New ideas were becoming more readily experimented with and even accepted by large portions of the population. Some of these included jazz music and the fight against the alcoholic prohibition. The radical idea I will focus on in this paper, however, is Evolution. It is a theory that had been around for over half a century before the 20’s but had only more recently caught on in the US. It contradicted the Christian theory of Divine Creation as described in the Bible. This caused many religious fundamentalists to fight against it. They took their battle to the law books, and they were challenged by pro-evolution modernists in the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925.
The Butler Act in Tennessee forbade the teaching of human evolution as written by Charles Darwin. In its place, teachers were to only teach the story of Creation as found in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. This, and thirty-six similar laws, was seen as an infringement on civil liberties. Upon learning of this new law, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), located in New York, placed advertisements in Tennessee newspapers in an attempt to find a teacher willing to stand up to the law.
The Arkansas Act 590 is an act that requires balanced treatment of creation-science and evolution-science in public schools, in order to protect academic freedom by providing the student a choice. (State of Arkansas 1981). If one was to look deeper into the Arkansas Act, they would find that not only was it set to protect academic freedom, but also established to guarantee freedom of belief and speech, as well as to prevent the establishment of religion. During a legal case, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the Act by trying to define the status of creation-science. They did not agree that creation-science was a genuine science. Due to this belief, they seeked to remove the teaching of creation-science from public schools, and label it not as a science.
The “Roaring Twenties” was a time period known for its innovation. Skirts got shorter, teens got bolder, and Prohibition was in full swing. These changes also gave way to a time period full of religious conflict. “In [religious] minds, Prohibition had always been about more than alcohol. It represented an effort to defend traditional American values against the growing influence of an urban, cosmopolitan culture” (Gillon 152). Charles Darwin had published his book, The Evolution of Species, in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, detailing the evolution of man from ape-like creatures. When A Civic Biology, a biology textbook containing information on evolution, was published in 1914, teachers around the country began using it in their courses. By the twenties, these books had sparked all sorts of new ideas regarding the origin of man as well as opposition due to the creature from which he claimed we evolved and to the disagr...
Since the Age of the Enlightenment, the institution of religion has had to contend with the opposition of science regarding the issues of the origins of the world and of the human species. Up until around the end of the 17th century, the church was the authority on how the world and everything in it had come to be. However, with the great intellectual revolution came thinkers such as Galileo, Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, and many others who challenged the biblical assumptions with empirically deduced scientific theories. The Catholic Church had a nasty habit of persecuting such ideological dissent toward creationism, calling it heresy and thereby somewhat suppressing a complete upheaval of the Scriptures. For many centuries to come, the scientific research grew and developed into theories like the Big Bang and evolution, though primarily in places where such progress was tolerated. The state of Tennessee in 1925 was not such a place. In the town of Dayton in Tennessee, a high school biology teacher was found to be in violation of a recently passed law, the Butler Act, because he taught the theory of evolution in his classroom. The debate that ensued has yet to be resolved, what with the modification of creationism into the theory of intelligent design. The argument in favor of creationism was solely based in scripture, though it had to be changed in light of its revamping, whereas the argument for evolution has only been strengthened by continued scientific discoveries.
In 1925, a teacher named John T Scopes was arrested for teaching the Theory of Evolution as this contradicted religion and their beliefs that God created the world.
Since the time that teaching evolution in public schools was banned as heresy and taboo for contradicting the Bible, most public school systems today take an opposite approach in which creationism is seldom ta...