On this day in 1925 teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial.”
Scopes was the football coach at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee, and only a part-time teacher. He had been recruited by a group of local businessmen who saw a challenge to Tennessee’s law forbidding the teaching of evolution as a way to get worldwide attention focused on Dayton.
Scopes appealed that $100 fine to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which ruled the Butler Act (that law forbidding teaching evolution in public schools) to be constitutional. They did, though, throw out the fine because it was set by the judge, not the jury.
Unable to find work teaching in Tennessee after the trial, Scopes returned to his home state of Kentucky around 1930. There he ran for Congress as a candidate for the Socialist party but lost. He then started working in the oil industry, first in Texas and then in Louisiana. He died in Shreveport on October 21, 1970, at the age of 70.
