March 22

Butler Act v. Evolution (1925)

It was on this date, March 22, 1925, that Tennessee passed the Butler Act, "prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory" in all public schools and universities and making it unlawful in public schools "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." And it was in the town of Dayton, Tennessee — population 1,800 and falling — where a bespectacled high school teacher named John T. Scopes, age 24, ran afoul of that law by assigning readings from Hunter's Civic Biology — a state-approved textbook — in short, relying on science in his biology class, rather than the Bible.

The Tennessee law was part of a national legislative campaign fathered by three-time losing presidential contender William Jennings Bryan. Tennessee was not the first or the last battleground for pseudoscience against science. Oklahoma and Florida had both passed anti-evolution laws in 1923. Mississippi and Arkansas passed their own anti-evolution laws within three years of the Scopes guilty verdict. Tennessee, not to be outdone in piety, went further in 1973, passing a law mandating both the labeling of evolution as "a theory" and the devotion of equal space in textbooks to "other theories," explicitly including Genesis.

After all, Evolution is "just a theory" — but so is the idea that the earth circles the sun!

Arkansas and Louisiana got onto the "equal time" bandwagon in 1981. And 2001 seemed to be a banner year for anti-science — or maybe it was a millennium bug — with anti-evolution bills introduced into the legislatures of Louisiana, Michigan, Washington State, Georgia, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Montana.

Although Tennessee's trial of John T. Scopes was the most famous — it inspired the 1955 play Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee — several court cases followed. Forty years afterward, science teacher Susan Epperson tested the 1928 Arkansas anti-evolution law — and won. But the Arkansas Supreme Court overturned the ruling, so it took the US Supreme Court to get religion out of science class. That precedent was good enough for the Mississippi Supreme Court to strike down Mississippi's own anti-evolution law.

In 1967, back in Tennessee, teacher Gary L. Scott, was fired under the Butler Act, took it to court, and this time got the Tennessee Senate to repeal it. Within a decade a pair of court cases overturned the "equal space" law, as well. But the modern assault on evolutionary theory pretty much started in the Tennessee legislature on this date, March 22, back in 1925.

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