In the next installment of Uncommon History with Daniel Hurt, Hurt speaks to Berry Craig, author and professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community & Technical College, about John T. Scopes, a Paducah native and namesake of one of the highest-profile legal cases of the 20th century commonly referred to as the "Scopes Monkey Trial." The case centered around the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in public classrooms in violation of a Tennessee state law banning such teachings. The prosecution included former presidential candidate and U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryans, as well as one of the top attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, Clarence Darrow. Craig says he first heard about the infamous case while working as a feature writer for the local paper.
"I had just gone to work in 1976 for the Paducah Sun-Democrat," Craig explains. "I was gravitating toward becoming a feature writer, and somebody mentioned to me that John Thomas Scopes of the Monkey Trial was from Paducah. I had never heard that before. This person also suggested that I could talk to his sister, Lela Scopes, to get a story." Luckily, Lela still lived in Paducah, but Craig says, "It was a really tough interview because she didn't want to talk a lot about it. I think the reason for that was she had been given quite a bit of grief over the fact that her brother was who he was, which, to a lot of religious folks, made him a really notorious man."
"She was very, very hesitant," Craig continues. "She said, 'All I want to do is confirm what you already know.' It was clear that she did not want any reporters hounding her about her brother. But after the interview went on, she began to open up a little bit more about him." Craig traced Scopes' roots back to his childhood home on Berger Road in Paducah. Scopes' father, Thomas Scopes, was an English-born union organizer and socialist who, while not formally educated, was well-read and enjoyed authors like Victor Hugo. Thomas Scopes was a railroad worker who moved to Salem, Illinois, which happened to be where William Jennings Bryan, the lead prosecutor of the Monkey Trial, was from.
Lela told Craig that her brother attended the University of Kentucky as a pre-law major until an unknown illness prevented him from physically withstanding the rigors of law school. He returned to his Paducah home directionless. "He was sort of lounging around the house and didn't know what to do, and Lela said, 'Well, I'll tell you what. I'll see if I can get you a job teaching.' He was hesitant. So, she got him a job at Ray County High School in Dayton, Tennessee, teaching math and coaching football." Craig asked Lela why she had chosen Dayton, Tennessee, and she replied, "I thought this was a nice, little, quiet place where John couldn't possibly get into any trouble."
Craig cited this quote as one of the more memorable ones he's collected from sources over the years, especially considering the trial that was to come from John's new teaching job. The trial was in protest of the Butler Act, a law passed by the state of Tennessee banning the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in public school classrooms. The American Civil Liberties Union was offering to pay the legal expenses for a test case challenging the law, and local Dayton community leaders believed it could benefit their community. "Some of the local boosters are in a drugstore in Dayton and read about this offer in the Chattanooga newspaper, and they think, 'Boy, wouldn't that put us on the map,'" Craig says. "Another one mentions that the Scopes kid from Paducah might have taught evolution the previous school semester, and so the idea gets planted."
The school boosters approached Scopes and asked him if he taught evolution in his class, and he said he taught his biology students directly from the textbook. If the textbook included the theory of evolution, then Scopes taught it. "The state of Tennessee, in its haste to remove evolution from the public schools, actually forgot to remove the textbook with evolution in it," Craig said. After it was determined that Scopes did teach evolution, he was asked to be the test case, and he agreed.
“He was not an unwitting pawn, but he believed in the separation of church and state. He believed in academic freedom,” Craig said. "Scopes never said a word during the trial. But the issue was much larger than that. It was a clash of the titans, but in the end, there was a little fine, and that’s it. It was a real symbol of the clash of cultures in the 1920s, along with prohibition, and it was basically rural versus urban and an era of legislating morality. You had the traditional fundamentalist, rural religion vs. science and modernism."
After the trial, Scopes returned to his family home in Paducah and faded from the headlines of the 1920s. He ran for Congress as a Socialist in 1932 and worked as an oil expert for United Production Corporation, later known as the United Gas Corporation, in Texas and Louisiana. His work briefly took him to South America. Scopes later worked for an oil company as a geologist and lived his life outside of the limelight. He never spoke publicly about the trial until 1967, when he published his story in a book titled Center of the Storm.
"When he died, they brought him back to Paducah," Craig said. "He's buried in Oak Grove Cemetery. If you go down the main road in the cemetery toward the end of it, you will see his grave. It's a very nondescript tombstone. It's got his name on it, and it simply says, 'A man of courage.' After finding out all of this and writing my story about Scopes, I thought I would love to see somebody put a historical marker at the entrance of Oak Grove saying he's in there." Craig said he got the Kentucky Historical Society to erect a monument in John Scopes' honor. He invited Lela Scopes to watch the sign be put into the ground, but she refused.
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