What is scopes trial

The presiding judge, John T. Raulston, had proposed holding the trial outdoors in a tent that would accommodate twenty thousand. Reporters assembled from as far away as London and Hong Kong. Mencken chronicled the trial for the Baltimore Sun. Years later, the U. Supreme Court struck down a similar Arkansas law in Epperson v. Arkansas , finding that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

This article was originally published in James C. Larson, Edward J. The weather was stiflingly hot and the rhetoric equally heated in this "trial of the century" attended by hundreds of reporters and others who crowded the Rhea County Courthouse in July Rather than the validity of the law under which Scopes was being charged, the authority of the Bible versus the soundness of Darwin's theory became the focus of the arguments.

Bryan and the anti-evolutionists claimed victory, and the Tennessee law would stand for another 42 years. But Clarence Darrow and the ACLU had succeeded in publicizing scientific evidence for evolution, and the press reported that though Bryan had won the case, he had lost the argument.

The verdict did have a chilling effect on teaching evolution in the classroom, however, and not until the s did it reappear in schoolbooks. Format: QuickTime or RealPlayer. During the Roaring Twenties, some in the United States were concerned about the supposedly immoral lifestyle that their neighbors were pursuing.

Many opponents of this more open and less conservative lifestyle were followers of the Progressive Movement. Many of these people were religious fundamentalists, people who believe that the Bible is the truth and that it must be taken literally. To deal with the supposedly increasing immorality of the U. One way religious fundamentalists and Progressives tried to force their neighbors to become more moral was to enact laws requiring public schools to teach the theory of creationism.

People who believe in creationism usually contend that God created human life, Adam and Eve, and that all people are descended from these two humans. Tennessee was one of the states in which the religious fundamentalists had success. In , the Tennessee government enacted a law that made it illegal "for any teacher in any of the universities, normal and all other public schools 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 descended from a lower order of animals.

He consented to the trial, receiving Planner's solemn promise that, in the event of failure, it should be the last. British parliament passed an act for transporting Americans to England for trial.

Receiving small encouragement in England, he applied to sugar-cane planters to give his engines a trial in the West Indies. Top Definitions Quiz Examples Scopes trial. New Word List Word List.