Increased Social Tensions in the 1920s » The Monkey Trial: Old Values Against New

Old values and new values

By 1920 a big change had happened. For the first time, more than half of Americans lived in towns and cities. City life was fast and busy, with cinemas, jazz and new ideas. Many people in the cities felt that the old rules mattered less. Other Americans did not like this at all.

Those people were often in small towns and farming areas, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest. This area is often called the Bible Belt. Here, church was the centre of community life. Many people believed that the Bible should be read as literally true. They worried that the cities were making young people careless about faith and good behaviour.

Key terms:

• Fundamentalist: a Christian who believes the Bible is word-for-word true and should guide how to live.
• Bible Belt: the religious, mostly rural parts of the South and Midwest where fundamentalist beliefs were strong.
• Evolution: the scientific idea, from Charles Darwin, that living things change over very long periods of time.

The Butler Act

Darwin published his ideas about evolution in 1859. Many Christians felt they went against the Bible's story of creation, in which God made humans. In the 1920s fundamentalists wanted evolution kept out of schools. Several Southern states tried to pass laws to stop it being taught.

In March 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act. It made it illegal for a teacher in a state-funded school to teach that humans had developed from lower animals. Breaking the law meant a fine.

The Monkey Trial, 1925

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offered to defend any teacher who broke the law. Businessmen in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, saw a chance to bring publicity to their town. A young teacher, John Scopes, agreed to be the test case. In July 1925 he was put on trial. Newspapers soon called it the Monkey Trial.

• Prosecution: the famous William Jennings Bryan joined the team. He was a politician and a former Secretary of State. He was a strong defender of the Bible.
• Defence: the best-known defence lawyer was Clarence Darrow. He was a lawyer from Chicago who did not believe in a literal reading of the Bible.

The trial began on 10 July 1925. Reporters came from across the USA and abroad, and it was broadcast on the radio. The most dramatic moment came on 20 July. Darrow called Bryan himself as a witness and questioned him sharply about whether every word of the Bible could be taken literally. Bryan struggled with some of the questions, and many newspapers said he looked foolish.

On 21 July the jury found Scopes guilty. The judge fined him $100. The trial had been about whether Scopes broke the law, not about whether evolution was true. Under that law, he had.

What happened next?

Bryan died five days after the trial ended, on 26 July. In 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes's conviction because of a mistake: the judge, not the jury, had set the fine. The state did not try him again. The Butler Act stayed in force until 1967.

So who won? The law stayed, so country people could say they had won. But many newspapers made fundamentalists look old-fashioned. The trial showed how deeply the USA was divided between old and new ways of thinking. Because it was reported so widely, the whole country saw that divide.

Exam-style question

These two sources are real words from the time. Read them, then answer the question.

Study Sources A and B. How far does Source A support the evidence of Source B about attitudes to religion and science in the Scopes trial? Explain your answer. [8 marks]

What lifts this to the top level: it gives agreement and difference, backs each with short quotations from both sources, and ends with a judgement on how far A supports B.