This View of Life 
A Visit to Dayton 
The site remains a pleasant, sleepy town, but the 
bestial cause of the Scopes trial stirs again 
by Stephen Jay Gould 
In his summation to the court, Cla- 
rence Darrow talked for three full days 
to save the lives of Nathan Leopold and 
Richard Loeb. Guilty they clearly were, 
of perhaps the most brutal and senseless 
murder of the 1920s. By arguing that 
they were victims of their upbringing, 
Darrow sought only to mitigate their 
personal responsibility and substitute a 
lifetime in jail for the noose. He won, as 
he usually did. 
John Thomas Scopes, defendant in 
Darrow’s next famous case, recalled his 
attorney’s theory of human behavior in 
the opening lines of an autobiography 
published long after the famous “mon- 
key trial” ( Center of the Storm, Holt, 
Rinehart and Winston, 1967). “Cla- 
rence Darrow spent his life arguing — 
teaching, really — that a man is the sum 
of his heredity and his environment.” 
The world may seem capricious, but 
events have their reasons, however com- 
plex. These reasons conspire to drive 
events forward; Leopold and Loeb were 
not free agents when they bludgeoned 
Bobby Franks and stuffed his body into 
a culvert, all to test the idea that a 
perfect crime might be committed by 
men of sufficient intelligence. 
We wish to find reasons for the mani- 
fest senselessness that surrounds us. But 
deterministic theories, such as Darrow’s, 
leave out the genuine randomness of our 
world, a chanciness that gives meaning 
to the old concept of human free will. 
Many events, although they move for- 
ward with accelerating inevitability 
after their inception, begin as a concat- 
enation of staggering improbabilities. 
And so we all began, as one sperm 
among billions vying for entry; a micro- 
second later, I might have been the 
Stephanie my mother wanted. 
The Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennes- 
see, occurred as the outcome of accumu- 
lated improbability. The Butler Act, 
passed by the Tennessee legislature and 
signed by Gov. Austin Peay on March 
21, 1925, declared it “unlawful for any 
teacher in any of the Universities, Nor- 
mals and all other public schools of the 
state — which are supported in whole or 
in part by the public school funds 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.” The bill could 
have been beaten with little trouble had 
the opposition bothered to organize and 
lobby (as they had the previous year in 
Kentucky, when a similar bill in similar 
circumstances went down to easy de- 
feat). The senate passed it with no en- 
thusiasm, assuming a gubernatorial 
veto. One member said of Mr. Butler: 
“The gentleman from Macon wanted a 
bill passed; he had not had much during 
the session and this did not amount to a 
row of pins; let him have it.” But Peay, 
admitting the bill’s absurdity and pro- 
testing that the legislature should have 
saved him from embarrassment by de- 
feating it, signed the act as an innocu- 
ous statement of Christian principles: 
“After a careful examination,” wrote 
Peay, “I can find nothing of conse- 
quence in the books now being taught in 
our schools with which this bill will 
interfere in the slightest manner. There- 
fore it will not put our teachers in any 
jeopardy. Probably the law will never be 
applied. . . . Nobody believes that it is 
going to be an active statute.” (See Ray 
Ginger’s Six Days or Forever? Beacon 
Press, 1958, reprinted in paperback by 
Oxford University Press, 1974, for a 
fine account of the legislative debate.) 
If the bill itself was improbable. 
Scopes’s test of it was even more un- 
likely. The American Civil Liberties 
Union (ACLU) offered to supply coun- 
cil and provide legal costs for any 
teacher willing to challenge the act by 
courting an arrest for teaching evolu- 
tion. The test was set for the favorable 
urban setting of Chattanooga, but plans 
fell through. Scopes didn’t even teach 
biology in the small, inappropriate, fun- 
damentalist town of Dayton, located 
forty miles north of Chattanooga. He 
had been hired as an athletic coach and 
physics teacher but had substituted in 
biology when the regular instructor (and 
principal of the school) fell ill. He had 
not actively taught evolution at all, but 
merely assigned the offending textbook 
pages as part of a review for an exam. 
When some town boosters decided that 
a test of the Butler Act might put Day- 
ton on the map — none showed much 
interest in the intellectual issues — 
Scopes was available only by another 
quirk of fate. (They would not have 
asked the principal, an older, conserva- 
tive family man, but they suspected that 
Scopes, a bachelor and free thinker, 
might go along.) The school year was 
over, and Scopes had intended to depart 
immediately for a summer with his fam- 
ily. But he stayed on because he had a 
date with “a beautiful blonde” at a 
forthcoming church social. 
Scopes was playing tennis on a warm 
afternoon in May, when a small boy 
appeared with a message from “Doc” 
Robinson, the local pharmacist and 
owner of Dayton’s social center, Robin- 
sons’ Drug Store. Scopes finished his 
game, for there is no urgency in Dayton, 
and then ambled on down to Robinsons’, 
