Opinion
100 years after the Scopes monkey trial, education is in the dock again
Today I’m remembering what Lela Scopes told me about her famous brother for my Paducah Sun story going on 46 years ago.
She said before John Thomas Scopes left to teach science and coach football at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tenn., in 1924, he explained: “I’m going there because it’s a small town with a small school where I won’t get in any deep water.”
The skinny, bespectacled, freckle-faced 24-year-old from Paducah ended up the defendant in one of history’s most sensationalized courtroom battles.
A century ago this month, Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, a Volunteer State law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. His punishment was a $100 fine.
But the “Monkey Trial” grabbed newspaper headlines worldwide. Dozens of reporters converged on Dayton. So did tent revivalists and swarms of hucksters hawking popcorn and pink lemonade and hustling Bibles and souvenirs, including stuffed monkeys.
The State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes was also the first trial broadcast live on radio.
I interviewed Lela Scopes in August 1979, when I was a Sun feature writer. She also said John had worried about what their mother might think of the trial: “He was afraid it would get in the Louisville paper, Mother would read about it and think he was a hothead.”
Anyway, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and now is one of those rhyming times.
“Public education is once again under siege from a sustained effort by Christian Nationalists to blur the line between church and state,” warns A.J. Schumann, a youth organizing fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Like today, the 1920s were times of “rapid social, economic and cultural change,” said David Krueger, professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah.
Scopes admitted he covered evolution when he substitute-taught for the absent biology teacher. (In their zeal to ban evolution, Tennessee lawmakers failed to remove the state-approved biology textbook, which included evolution.)
Scopes believed in evolution and agreed to stand trial on principle.
The trial, which began on July 10, 1925, and concluded on July 21, was essentially a clash of competing values: urban science and modernism versus rural, old-time Protestant fundamentalist Christianity.
“The cause defended at Dayton is a continuing one that has existed throughout man’s brief history and will continue as long as man is here,” Scopes wrote in Center of the Storm, his 1967 memoir. “It is the cause of freedom, for which man must do what he can.”
The attorneys embodied the collision of values. Tennessee summoned William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska as special prosecutor. A fundamentalist champion, he had been a Democratic congressman, secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate.
The American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow to lead Scopes’ defense team. Darrow was widely considered the country’s top defense lawyer. He was from Chicago, believed in evolution and was an agnostic.
Bryan and Darrow dueled like gladiators in the sweltering midsummer East Tennessee heat. The courtroom became so hot that the trial was moved outdoors to the tree-shaded courthouse lawn where the crowd of spectators grew even larger.
Bryan got a conviction as expected. But progressives, including liberal Christians, believed science and reason had vanquished “EVIL-lution” in the court of public opinion. They pointed to July 20, when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert.
“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” The New York Times reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion, and little even of ancient history.”
In Only Yesterday, his 1931 chronicle of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost. Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws, and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”
Allen and the progressives of his day missed the mark. Donald Trump and his Republican Party owe a big part of their electoral success to white Christian evangelicals of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” persuasion.
Schumann warned that “today’s Christian Nationalist rhetoric echoes the anti-modernist anxieties of the 1920s — fear that secularism is destroying ‘traditional values’ and that public institutions should reflect a ‘Christian America.’”
He wrote that the First Amendment safeguards all Americans “from having any single belief system imposed on them by the state,” a fact that seems to be lost on much of the GOP these days.
Schumann concluded that the Scopes “trial reminds us that the separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”
Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. He is buried in the family plot in Paducah’s Oak Grove Cemetery next to his wife, Mildred, and close to Lela, who died in 1989 at 92. “A Man of Courage” is his epitaph. A state historical marker at the cemetery’s main entrance tells about him.
Scopes said not a word during the trial. He got his chance at the end.
After the jury delivered the expected guilty verdict and the judge fined Scopes $100, one of his lawyers pointed out that the defendant had been denied the right to speak before sentencing.
“Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute,” Scopes said. “I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideals of academic freedom, that is to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”
After Scopes finished, the judge repeated the fine. The verdict was later overturned on a technicality, Schumann wrote, but the Butler Act wasn’t repealed until 1967.
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Georgia GOP has won 2026 already — with a truly evil scheme
It’s all over but the official count. Georgia Republicans can’t win the Senate seat now held by Democrat Jon Ossoff — the demographics will drown them: Georgia is now a “majority minority” state with non-whites predominant. EXCEPT. EXCEPT if the GOP can come up with a way to stop those un-white voters from voting.
And they have. This week, the violently partisan Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced that he is removing tens of thousands of voters who live in addresses that Republicans rarely haunt: office spaces used as housing [and] homes with 10 or more registrants.
That’s ON TOP OF the 480,000 voters the state is about to remove as “inactive voters.”
Hey, it all sounds reasonable. But consider this: in the entire history of Georgia, since the days of its treasonous attack on America, NOT ONE person has been convicted of voting while dead, while non-existent, while an illegal alien. Not one.
In other words, this is a punishment looking for a crime. And it’s severe punishment: losing your voting rights happens when you’re convicted of a felony crime.
But what you’re looking at is what we politely call, “institutional racism,” because, from what we learned from our in-depth study for the ACLU, is that the overwhelming number of Georgians purged are voters of color — the color ‘blue’ for Democratic. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, new young voters … you get it.
The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the premier voting rights organization, warned: “This would create new and unnecessary barriers to voting for Georgia’s unhoused and housing-insecure voters — a population estimated to include over 10,000 eligible Georgian voters. Among the segment of the homeless population that is residing in shelter facilities more than 50 percent of the time, 2022 data found 57 percent were Black and 31 percent were adult victims of domestic violence.“
And here’s one of the most evil schemes announced by Raffensperger. (I use “evil” most carefully). He’s announced Georgia will remove 87,027 voters because they’ve filed Change of Address forms with the post office.
If you’ve seen my film, Vigilantes Inc., you know the story of Maj. Gamaliel Turner of Columbus, Georgia, because he filed a change-of-address to get his absentee ballot while assigned by the Pentagon to California. He was one 4,000 who lost their vote to a challenge by the Georgia Republican Party on or near his military base.
Then there was Christine Jordan, MLK’s cousin, who put in a change of address form because, at 92, she wanted her daughter to review her mail.
Then there is the case of Dr. Carry Smith, expert on voter purges, who herself was removed for cockamamy reasons.
But I want you to see the faces of American apartheid’s victims. If these were rare cases, I wouldn’t waste your time. But removing hundreds of thousands of voters can, and has, changed the presidency and control of the Senate.
And let’s not pussyfoot around the purpose of this ethnic cleansing of Georgia’s voter rolls: Gov. Brian Kemp is termed out next year, so the only way he can climb up the greasy pole is to challenge the popular Sen. Ossoff. Kemp can’t, and never has, won fair and square.
Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket raised the alarm this week about the new mass purges in Georgia. Elias cited my study for the ACLU that showed that 63.3 perscent of voters, in 2020, were purged from the rolls even though the Postal Service and Amazon’s experts (they know where you live) verified that 198,351 of them still lived at their legal voting address.
We gave the names of the wrongly purged to Raffensperger — who defied a federal judge in refusing to review our list. Still, Ossoff and Biden won the state: evidence that they can’t steal all the votes all the time.
But they can try. This year, the state has doubled the number of voters facing the elimination of their citizenship rights. Gerald Griggs, President of the Georgia NAACP, is staring at that list of half a million Georgia voters about to get the heave-ho. He says, “This is Jim Crow 2.0. We’ve warned you, America: what they test in Georgia they will take to your state.”
What about those voters living at “commercial addresses.” That would be me: I lived in a building zoned for business which my friends and me turned into apartments. Who could have dreamed that my right to vote depended on my zoning.
By the way, Mr. Raffensperger: if you find illegal voters, arrest them. They’ll be in nursing homes … and, according to the Vera Institute, at least 10,000 are in Georgia’s jails awaiting trial. Mr. Raffensperger, a poor man who can’t make bail, sitting in the can awaiting trial for selling dime bags, should not lose their citizenship. We are not Russia. Yet.
Here’s what you can do:
- Spread this story. Like it, and share it.
- Subscribe to my new Substack.
- Catch my new column at RawStory
- Check if you’ve been purged by CHECKING YOUR REGISTRATION at Vote.org — NOW!
- Greg Palast is the author of investigative reports for outlets including the Guardian, the BBC, and Rolling Stone, and New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. His latest film, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, is narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio. On Substack, he writes at Greg Palast Investigates
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Sheer ambition has pitched this red state's leadership into a civil war
When the Georgia Senate stunned the state Capitol and wrapped up work before the typical midnight deadline on the last night of the 2025 session, a visibly frustrated House Speaker Jon Burns took a not-so-subtle dig at his friends across the hall.
“The House is focusing on its priorities of getting the job done, and we’re not worried about moving on to some other higher office,” the powerful Republican told reporters shortly before gaveling out his own chamber. “We came here to do a job, and we did our job.”
With the exception of the presidency, just about every position in politics can be considered a stepping stone to something bigger. But it’s not often (maybe once every four or eight years) that ambitious and powerful lawmakers suddenly go from colleagues to campaign rivals as they all seek to add another title to their resume.
The tension is already creeping into Georgia’s upper chamber, where greetings on the Senate floor have started to sound more aspirational than ceremonial. It’s not out of the ordinary, a former lawmaker once said, to hear someone walk onto the Senate floor and randomly shout, “Good morning, Congressman!”
But it’s becoming more than just a joke tossed around the chamber. At least 10 state senators — Republican and Democrat — are leaving behind their seats and leadership positions to run for “some other higher office,” in the colorful words of the speaker. And that number could grow as more offices open up ahead of the 2026 elections.
Let’s start at the top: Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who serves as president of the senate, recently launched a bid for governor.
Three Republican state senators have already entered the race to succeed Jones: Steve Gooch of Dahlonega, John F. Kennedy of Macon and Blake Tillery of Vidalia. State Sen. Josh McLaurin, a Sandy Springs attorney, is the only known Democratic contender so far.
With Attorney General Chris Carr also fighting for the governor’s chair, Republican state Sens. Brian Strickland of McDonough and Bill Cowsert of Athens, both lawyers, are aiming to become the state’s next top prosecutor. State Sen. Emanuel Jones is challenging a longtime incumbent in a metro Atlanta congressional seat. And state Sen. Jason Esteves is running in the Democratic primary for governor.
A lot of these names aren’t “backbenchers” — they are synonymous with the levers of power in the chamber. Kennedy is the president pro tempore, Gooch is the majority leader, and Tillery chairs the budget-drafting appropriations committee. Strickland chairs the judiciary committee, and Cowsert is also a former Senate leader (and a brother-in-law to outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp).
And a change in Republican bylaws means that many of these members must immediately stand down from their roles in leadership while they campaign for a different office, which means new leaders are already being named ahead of the 2026 session.
While this mass exodus of seasoned legislators definitely says a lot about their own ambitions (and how awkward next year’s session is going to be), it’s also a sign of the power transition underway at the state Capitol with Gov. Brian Kemp entering the final year of his term.
The governor’s mansion isn’t the only big office up for grabs. Insurance Commissioner John King is running to oust Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper are said to be plotting their next moves as well. More open statewide offices could lead to more lawmakers ditching their annual 40 days of work in search for higher office.
With several key senators already departing, however, the chamber is set to lose years of wisdom and institutional knowledge as key offices prepare to change hands. So the next governor and lieutenant governor won’t be the only ones learning on the job — a lot of their legislative partners will be new to their roles as well.
Strickland says the looming leadership turnover brings a great opportunity for new faces and names to step up to the plate.
“I think you’re going to see a chance for new people to step in who might have different leadership styles, but will maybe bring some needed changes in some particular areas,” he said recently while on break from court.
In the short term, lawmakers will need to convene for one more session before next November. But with so many senators running for other offices, how many of them will be focused on doing the work they were elected to do and not itching to get back out on the campaign trail?
“I think it’s incumbent on all of us who are running statewide to set [our campaigns] aside for those 40 days and to do the job we were elected to do for those 40 days,” finished Strickland.
“Obviously there’s going to be some tension. My hope is that it does not come from me.”
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