The
visiting preacher, addressing the
congregation
in the Primitive Baptist church, told of
young woman in his Tennessee
community who enrolled in a
biology course at a nearby university. When the woman
finished the course and returned home,
the
preacher said,
she was no longer a Christian. The
theory of evolution destroyed her faith
in God.
John
Washington Butler, a
rugged, thickset, corn and
tobacco farmer, listened to the
preacher’s sermon and, according to his
later
account of the story, got to thinking. Butler
asked
himself
whether evolution could turn one his own
three boys into an atheist. Could this
happen to his neighbors’
children? During
the winters, when not
working his hundred-and-twenty acre farm
or doing custom thrashing for
other
farmers, Butler
had taught a few sessions in local
schools. He grew more worried
realizing that
the danger might not be even as far off
as the universities: evolution
was
taught in the high schools of his own Macon
County. It just wasn’t
right, Butler
thought, that parents could
bring
their children up to be God-fearing,
only to have a taxpayer-supported
biology
teacher rob them of their faith. Evolution fit
into a strong concern he had about
education: it
replaced
the solid, land-based values of his
neighbors with more cosmopolitan
and
irreligious values.
John
Butler ran as a Democrat for
state
representative the following year, 1922. In his
campaign fliers, Butler
promised
voters in his district, three counties
northeast of Nashville
along the Kentucky
border, that he would work to protect
schoolchildren from the effects
of the
godless doctrine of evolution. Three
years later, when the Scopes “Monkey”
Trial came to Tennessee, Butler
told an
interviewer that the dairy farmers and
sheep ranchers of this rural
district
overwhelmingly supported his stand
against teaching evolution. “Ninety-nine
people out of a hundred in my
district thought just as I did,” Butler
said. “I
say ninety-nine out of a
hundred because there may be some hold
different from what I think they
do, but
so far as I know there isn’t a one in
the whole district that thinks
evolution—of man, that is—can be the way
scientists tell it.”
Butler's
opposition
to evolution,
unlike that of most critics of the
theory, did not stem from
evangelistic
fundamentalism. In
fact, the small
Primitive Baptist sect (72,000 members
nationally in 1960) of which Butler was a
member was as anti-evangelistic as Tennessee
denominations
came, adopting the view that God has
chosen who will be saved, and that
nothing
can be done to change his mind. Butler’s
Primitive
sect
therefore eschewed revival meetings,
missionary work, and even Sunday
schools.
The key distinction with the more
popular Missionary Baptist beliefs,
as Butler
saw it, was that
Primitive Baptists did not believe that
accepting God’s message was a
precondition to entering Heaven: “Now I
don’t believe, and no Primitive
Baptist
believes, that God would condemn a man
just because he never
heard of
the gospel.”
Butler won
his race. Two
years later, William Jennings Bryan came
to the state capital in Nashville, a
city he
called “the center of modernism in the
South,” to denounce the theory
of
evolution before Butler
and his colleagues.
On the
morning of his forty-ninth
birthday, just
after finishing breakfast, Butler
sat down in the living room in front
of his stone fireplace and wrote
the law
upon that John Scopes would be charged
with violating. “I
wrote it out just like I wanted it,” Butler
said at
the time
of the trial, “and that’s the way the
law stands now, just the way I
first
wrote it.” The law, as Butler
drafted it, made it “unlawful for any
teacher” in state-supported
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.” Teachers
who violated the law
were subject to a maximum fine of
$500.
Six days after Butler
introduced his anti-evolution bill, the House
passed it on a vote of
seventy-one to five. Some
members voted
for the bill because they agreed with it; others
supported it because
they
feared the reaction of their constituents. No
public hearings preceded
the
vote, and the action was taken with almost no
discussion. Answering
one member’s request to hold the
bill over for debate, Butler
replied, “I do not see the need for any further
talk, as everyone knows
what
evolution means.”
Not everyone in Tennessee
agreed with Butler’s
view on the value of debate, however.
News of the House action on the Butler
bill sent evolution’s supporters scurrying for their
pens. Letters poured
into the editors of state
papers. Many compared
the proposed Tennessee
legislation to
the position taken by the Catholic Church that led
to the scientist’s
1633 trial
for publishing his allegedly heretical view that the
earth revolved
around the
sun, rather than vice versa as the Bible seemed to
suggest. One letter
writer joked that there was “no
better proof” to be found of the “truthfulness of Darwin’s
theory than to visit Capitol
Hill
and view some of its occupants.”
After
a
Tennessee
Senate
committee voted down Butler’s
bill, anti-evolutionists counterattacked.
In public letters, supporters of the Butler
bill stressed the duty of a
state to
make sure that the content of its public education
wasn’t doing more
harm than
good. Fundamentalist
evangelist Billy
Sunday came to Memphis
in February 1925 to tell a rapt crowd,
“Education today is chained to the Devil’s
throne” and to
hear
him
praise the Tennessee House for having the courage to
take “action against that
God forsaken gang of
evolutionary cutthroats.” By
the time
Sunday’s crusade ended, after a “Men’s Night” speech and
a “Ladies
Night”
speech and a “Negro Night” speech and even an unofficial
“Klan Night”
speech,
200,000 Tennessee
residents turned out to hear Sunday’s flaying of
evolution. The public tide
turned decidedly in favor of Butler’s bill.
An
aroused
Senate—ignoring the
heckling of Vanderbilt students who crowded the
galleries during
debate--approved
Butler’s bill on a vote of twenty-four to six. In so doing, it rejected the
arguments of a Republican
legislator who
blamed the whole controversy on “that greatest of all
disturbers of the
political and public life from the last twenty-eight or
thirty years, I
mean
William Jennings Bryan.”
Opponents
of Butler’s
bill
held out the hope that Governor
Austin Peay, considered a progressive in most circles,
would veto it. They were,
however, disappointed—taking at
most small consolation in the Governor’s opinion that
“nothing of
consequence
in the books now being taught in our schools” would
offend the new law. “The
people must have the right to regulate
what is taught in their schools,” Peay said in
explaining his decision
to sign
the Butler Act. He offered
his
additional opinion that the law would never be enforced.
When
the ACLU
lawyers put his
new law to the test in the Scopes trial, John Butler
journeyed 175
miles to Dayton
to report the
confrontation in his new role as trial commentator for a
press
association. He got the job
in part
because of his background as a frequent writer of
satirical pieces for
local
papers back on Tennessee’s
hilly highland rim.
As the
day
for the
start of the
trial approached, Butler
expressed his views on the subject of evolution often
and willingly. His law, he
said, protects “our children from
infidelity.” He called
evolution “only a
guess” and contended that there was “no controversy
between true
science and
the Bible.” (Ginger, 82-83)
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It is
Monday,
July
13,
1925. John Butler sits in
his front row
seat in the Rhea
County
courthouse to hear argument on the defense motion to
quash the
indictment of
Scopes on the grounds that the Butler Act violates
either the Tennessee
or
United States Constitution.
Representing
the
State
of Tennessee,
Attorney
General Thomas Stewart argues that the law is a
straightforward
exercise of the
right of the state legislature to determine what is
taught in public
schools. The law is a
legitimate exercise
of the
state’s power to control and direct the curriculum,
Stewart says. “That is what
it is and nothing else.” (T,
67)
Sue
Hicks, a
local
member of
the prosecution team, ridicules the defense claim of
unconstitutionality. It is
“perfectly
ridiculous to say,” Hicks
says, “that a teacher…can go in and teach any kind of
doctrine he
wants.” What if, he
wondered, a teacher
hired to
teach arithmetic decided he would rather teach
architecture? (T, 60)
Arthur
Garfield
Hays, speaking
for the defense, contends that the state’s argument goes
too far. Surely, Hays
argues, Tennessee
could not prohibit
teaching the
Copernican theory that the earth revolves around the
sun, and put to
death any
teacher who dared to violate the law.
“Evolution is a much a scientific fact as the
Copernican
theory,” Hays
asserts, and just as the “Copernican theory has been
fully
accepted…this must
be accepted.” (T, 57)
Ben
McKenzie,
another local
member of the prosecution team, finds Hays’s analogy to
a ban on
Copernican
theory too much to stomach. He
assures
Hays that the possibility of such a prohibition has
never “passed the
fertile
brain of a Tennessean.” He
adds, shaking
his head and looking at the New
York
defense attorney in apparent amazement, “I don’t know
what they do up
in his
country.” (T, 57)
Clarence
Darrow takes up Hays’s argument. He
insists
that curricular decisions must be
“within reason” to satisfy constitutional standards. Could Tennessee
tell its teachers they were “only to teach religion”? Could it drop from the
curriculum all mention
of arithmetic, geography, and writing?
Could it require teachers to tell students “that
the
Christian
religion,
as unfolded in the Bible, is true, and that every other
religion…is
false”? (T,
75)
Darrow
is
just
warming up. Ignoring the
small matter that
the author of
the Butler Act espoused no fundamentalist views, Darrow
says John
Scopes is in
the courtroom today “because the fundamentalists are
after everybody
that
thinks.” The theory of
evolution is,
Darrow asserts, “believed by every scientific man on
earth.” (T, 79-80) The Butler Act is “as brazen
and bold an attempt to
destroy
learning as
was ever made in the Middle Ages.”
(T,
75) John Butler and the
legislature of Tennessee tried
to “grab
science by throat and throttle it to death.” (T, 83) The attempted murder of
science must fail,
Darrow says, because the Constitution stands as “the
flaming sword to
protect
the rights of man against ignorance and bigotry.” (T,
83)
Darrow
ends
his
argument
dramatically, with words that will—in slightly condensed
form—thirty-five years
later come from the mouth of Spencer Tracy, when he
plays Darrow in the
first
movie version of “Inherit the Wind”:
“If
today you
can
take a thing
like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the
public school,
tomorrow
you can make it a crime to teach it in the private
schools, and the
next year
you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or
in the church.
At the
next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon
you may set
Catholic
against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant,
and try to foist
your own
religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you
can do the other.
Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding.
Always it is
feeding
and gloating for more. Today it is the public school
teachers, tomorrow
the
private. The next day, the preachers and the lectures,
the magazines,
the
books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is
the setting of
man
against man and creed against creed until with flying
banners and
beating drums
we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the
sixteenth century
when
bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring
any
intelligence and
enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the
Scopes
trial
continued,
the slow-spoken Butler
expressed his views more often than he reported those of
others, and
his
remarks often surprised many eastern reporters. He explained in one interview
that he had no objection to
the
teaching
of evolution in schools that are not taxpayer-supported:
“If a man
wants to put
up his own school, let him teach all the evolution he
wants.” He even indicated
that he wanted his own
nineteen-year-old son to “learn about evolution”—but by
reading about
it at
home where he can find out “for himself how untrue it
is.” He himself, he told
reporters, had read both
of Darwin’s
two
chief
books on evolution. When
defense
attorney Dudley Malone, pleading that defense experts be
allowed to
testify on
the meaning of evolution, thundered, “We feel we stand
with science; we
feel we
stand with intelligence; we feel we stand with
fundamental freedom in America,”
Butler
called it “the finest speech of the century.” And when Judge Raulston ruled
that defense experts would
not be
allowed
to take the stand, Butler
sided with the defense. “I
used to be a
great baseball player,” Butler
explained to an interviewer between sips of Coca Cola. “Anyone who has played
baseball likes to see
things done fair. And I
think the judge
should have let those experts testify if Darrow wanted
‘em. I am not
afraid of
expert testimony.” “It
would have been
fair to everybody,” Butler
contended,
so long as
“Bryan
could
have cross-questioned ‘em and brought on expert Bible
witnesses too and
made
his points.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On July 21, 1925, after Judge
Raulston adjourns the Scopes trial for the last time, John
Butler
writes a
final dispatch in his role as correspondent.
“I am not afraid of investigation,” the legislator
pens,
adopting the
words of defense attorney Malone. “The Truth is mighty and
will
prevail.” The evolution
debate, Butler
declares, is “the controversy of the age” and the “Dayton
trial is the beginning of a
great
battle between infidelity and Christianity.”
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