Things evolve, but stay the same

In 1925, the Tennessee Legislature passed the Butler Act, which made it unlawful for any teacher in the state’s public schools and universities “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.” Meant to stop teachers from introducing Charles Darwin’s work on evolution to their students, the bill mandated that “offending teachers be fined between $100 and $500 for each offense.” In 2025 dollars, that’s a fine of slightly less than $2,000 to $10,000. 

Shortly after the bill became law, John Scopes, a high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, agreed to serve as the criminal defendant in a test case to be focused on the constitutional protections of freedom of speech. But things went sideways fast. Three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan volunteered his services for the prosecution saying, “Teachers in the public schools must teach what the taxpayers desire taught.” Clarence Darrow, who was the most famous criminal lawyer of the period, volunteered to direct the defense with his team saying, “The question is not whether evolution is true or untrue, but involves the freedom of teaching, or more important, the freedom of learning.”

Over 200 reporters came to town along with 3,000 spectators. Merchants decorated their shops with pictures of apes and monkeys. The local drugstore offered Simian Sodas and the town constable affixed a sign to his motorcycle reading “Monkeyville Police.” Everyone agreed it would be the trial of the century.

Among those present that summer was a young Black fiddler and mandolinist named Howard Armstrong. Born in Dayton in 1909, the 16-year-old musician was busking on the streets throughout the trial. Seventy-five years later, at 91 and a recipient of the National Heritage Award, Armstrong came to Wyoming, where he performed and taught workshops for adults and students. He told me that it was when all those people were in Dayton for the trial that he began to play music of many kinds — Irish, Italian, Polish, Mexican. Later, living in Chicago, he translated English lyrics to sing in Chinese. “You had to play for everybody if you wanted to make a living,” he said.

Another musician influenced by the trial was Uncle Dave Macon, a white banjo player. In 1926, he recorded “The Bible Song,” one verse of which declares, “Evolution teaches man came from a monkey. I don’t believe in no such a thing in a day of the week or Sunday. For the Bible’s true. Yes, I believe it. I’ve seen enough, and I can prove it. What you say, what you say, it’s bound to be that way.”

While the Scopes trial had a comic carnival-like atmosphere, it was deadly serious business — the first battle in our now hundred-year-long culture wars. It took place in a time of social upheaval and dislocation — the aftermath of World War I and the global flu epidemic, widespread anti-immigrant sentiment, the arrest and imprisonment of people for criticizing then-President Woodrow Wilson, the round up and deportation of suspected socialists, anarchists and communists.

It’s unnerving how much this sounds like our situation now — ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the aftereffects of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the U.S. president’s attacks on his critics, and ignoring due process, his order to murder suspected drug traffickers in international waters. Along with these, we’re experiencing a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by the rise in global migration that is itself fueled by war, climate change, ethnic and racial conflict, and by ordinary intractable poverty in the face of unimaginable wealth. Think of Elon Musk with over $500 billion.

Just as the 1925 Tennessee Legislature passed a law to control access to what was then a controversial book, so has the 2025 Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee voted 11-2 to introduce a bill mandating that public and school libraries keep “sexually explicit” material inaccessible to people under 18. Perhaps not surprisingly, the bill does not appear to be aimed at what people often call pornography. Rather, it’s to keep LGBTQ+ materials out of the reading view of young people seeking to understand themselves and the society they will both inherit and shape.

Tennessee’s 1925 Butler Act banning the teaching of evolution and Wyoming’s 2025 proposed bill to limit young people’s access to materials exploring human development and personal identity are misguided and, in the long run will not attain their goals, neither those that are stated nor those that remain unspoken. 1925 to 2025 — a hundred years. I hope we evolve beyond such legislation before another hundred pass.