Biography
Hell and the High Schools, first published in 1922, attacked the theory of evolution and the teaching of evolution in tax-supported schools as "the greatest curse that ever fell upon this earth". In Martin's view this was an even greater sin than when the Germans poisoned wells and gave children poisoned candy during World War I. Martin wanted parents to pressure school boards and state legislatures to take steps to stop the teaching of evolution. The following is an example of Martin's prose style from the book:
- "Reader, if you are not a parent, do you not yearn intensely to turn my child, your neighbor's child, your enemy's child, from spending Eternity in hell? Were even your enemy's house on fire, would you stand by in indifference and let his child be burned alive? Yet that child's being burned alive is as nothing when compared to that child's spending eternity in hell. You would go to the limit in helping to rescue the child from the burning building. Isn't saving a soul from spending eternity in hell ten million times more important than saving a human body from a burning building?"
Martin defended anti-evolution laws by claiming that they protected the individual liberty of religious students. Christ or Evolution was his other significant work, and is in a similar vein, constituting a colorful pair of diatribes if not outright polemics on the subject. Both works are representative of the anti-evolution rhetoric of this period. Granted, Martin was not as eloquent as William Jennings Bryan, but then there was nobody in the movement on the same level as the Great Commoner. However, Martin proved to be just as influential in getting anti-evolution laws passed, which is what makes these two works of great interest to those studying the history of the conflict between Christianity and science over evolution in this country and a struggle that is now almost a century old.
Martin showed up for the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, where he rented a store as a book shop on which he hung a giant sign that promoted his books. Also sold were Martin's Evolution or Christ, Bryan's In His Image, Alfred W. McCann's God--or Gorilla?, and B.H. Shadduck's Puddle to Paradise. The best sellers proved to be Hell and the High Schools and the Adventist science educator George McCready Price's The Phantom of Organic Evolution. (Price was Bryan's main authority in his only speech in court during the trial.)
During the trial Martin preached on the streets of Dayton and once cornered H.L. Mencken in the Rhea County Courthouse and demanded to know if he was converted or not. During a second encounter outside of Robinson's Drug Store, Mencken told Martin there was a group of Bolsheviks arriving in town to murder Bryan, which sent the preacher to warn the local police that the ACLU was sending assassins to kill Bryan and other Christian notables. Martin gave his permit to preach from the public platform one evening to Charles Francis Potter, provided the Modernist minister did not preach about evolution. (Martin was under the same prohibition, and Potter made a plea for liberal education as the basis for values instead.)
In February 1926 a monkey bill similar to Tennessee's Butler Act was introduced in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Martin and others from Washburn's Bible Crusaders arrived to lobby the legislators, and the bill passed 76 to 32. In the state Senate there was a heated debate, during which an opponent proposed an amendment to make the penalty "death by burning at the stake, it being the spirit of this bill to restore the Spanish Inquisition." The amendment was defeated but the bill passed, 29 to 16, and was signed by Governor Henry L. Whitfield. While Chancellor Hume of the University of Mississippi argued the law would force the state's teachers to be intellectually dishonest, the superintendent of the high school in Meridian held a public bonfire to burn all pages about evolution from textbooks used in his school. An ACLU offer to assist any Mississippi taxpayer or member of the American Association of University Professors in a suit to challenge the case was ignored given what had happened in Dayton to John T. Scopes.
Because of Martin's efforts, and rhetoric in keeping with these anti-evolution writings, Mississippi became one of only two states to pass and keep anti-evolution legislation on the books in the wake of the Scopes Trial. The other state was Arkansas, and it was that state's law that was the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that anti-evolution laws were unconstitutional in Epperson vs. Arkansas , 393 U.S. 97 (1968).
Martin died on May 23, 1939, and was buried at Gloster, Mississippi. On his gravestone were carved the three Scripture texts which were the core of his ministry: John 3:16, Acts 16:31, and John 5:24.
The Scopes trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.
The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the book of Genesis account of mankind's origin. The law also prevented the teaching of the evolution of man from what it referred to as lower orders of animals in place of the Biblical account. The law was introduced by Tennessee House of Representatives member John Washington Butler, from whom the law got its name. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 (Education) Section 1922, having been signed into law by Tennessee governor Austin Peay.
William Jennings Bryan was an American lawyer, orator, and politician. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. He served in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895 and as the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1915. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called "the Great Commoner", and because of his rhetorical power and early fame as the youngest presidential candidate, "the Boy Orator".
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.
Dayton is a city in and the county seat of Rhea County, Tennessee, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 7,065. The Dayton Urban Cluster, which includes developed areas adjacent to the city and extends south to Graysville.
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925, with violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee schools. He was tried in a case known as the Scopes Trial, and was found guilty and fined $100.
The Great Monkey Trial is a book on the Scopes Trial by L. Sprague de Camp, first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1968. The book is a non-fiction account of the trial, as well as its social and political context and impact. This history of the trial was based on the archives of the A.C.L.U., assorted newspaper files, correspondence and interviews with over a dozen of those present at the trial, books and magazine articles written on the trial, and a couple of visits to Dayton. The book also contains several political cartoons published at the time of the trial. Several critics have referred to the book as the definitive or comprehensive account of the Scopes Trial.
William Bell Riley was an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor. He was known as "The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism."
The Anti-Evolution League of America was a biblical creationist organization created in 1924 a year after William Bell Riley founded the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota. The first president was the Kentucky preacher Dr. J. W. Porter and T. T. Martin of Mississippi was field secretary and editor of the organization's official organ, The Conflict. The organization was behind anti-evolution legislation in Kentucky, where its efforts were supported by William Jennings Bryan. Following Bryan's death after the Scopes Trial, his son, William Jennings Bryan, Jr., briefly accepted the presidency of the league.
John Roach Straton was an American Baptist pastor. Straton was the son of the Reverend Henry Dundas Douglas Straton and the former Julia Rebecca Carter of Virginia. He became a Christian when he was a teenager and heard the revival preaching of James Hawthorne.
"The Monkey Suit" is the twenty-first and penultimate episode of the seventeenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on May 14, 2006. In the episode, Ned Flanders is shocked after seeing a new display at the museum about evolution. Together with Reverend Lovejoy, he spreads the religious belief of creationism in Springfield, and at a later town meeting, teaching evolution is made illegal. As a result, Lisa decides to hold secret classes for people interested in evolution. However, she is quickly arrested and a trial against her is initiated.
The fundamentalist–modernist controversy is a major schism that originated in the 1920s and 1930s within the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. At issue were foundational disputes about the role of Christianity; the authority of the Bible; and the death, resurrection, and atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Two broad factions within Protestantism emerged: fundamentalists, who insisted upon the timeless validity of each doctrine of Christian orthodoxy; and modernists, who advocated a conscious adaptation of the Christian faith in response to the new scientific discoveries and moral pressures of the age. At first, the schism was limited to Reformed churches and centered around the Princeton Theological Seminary, whose fundamentalist faculty members founded Westminster Theological Seminary when Princeton went in a liberal direction. However, it soon spread, affecting nearly every Protestant denomination in the United States. Denominations that were not initially affected, such as the Lutheran churches, eventually were embroiled in the controversy, leading to a schism in the United States.
Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes is a 1958 book about the Scopes Trial by Ray Ginger, first published in hardcover by Beacon Press and later reprinted in paperback by Oxford University Press. Ginger, a New York trade book editor at the time and later, a professor of history at Brandeis, Wayne State University, and the University of Calgary, had written about Eugene Debs and the city of Chicago in the time of John Peter Altgeld before he tackled the Scopes trial. In the conclusion of Six Days or Forever? Ginger wrote that his book had two purposes: First, to get "the facts straight" in order to correct "many mistakes in previous accounts of the episodes," believing that his book "comes much closer than do those accounts to telling what actually occurred." Second, Ginger "tried to view the Scopes trial in the broadest possible context" (242).
The Rhea County Courthouse is a historic county courthouse in the center of Dayton, the county seat of Rhea County, Tennessee. Built in 1891, it is famous as the scene of the Scopes trial of July 1925, in which teacher John T. Scopes faced charges for including Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in his public school lesson. The trial became a clash of titans between lawyers William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, and epitomizes the tension between fundamentalism and modernism in a wide range of aspects of American society. The courthouse, now also housing a museum devoted to the trial, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
Inherit the Wind is an American play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which debuted in 1955. The story fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a means to discuss the then-contemporary McCarthy trials.
Inherit the Wind is a 1960 American drama film directed by Stanley Kramer and based on the 1955 play of the same name written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. It stars Spencer Tracy as lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March as his friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady. It also features Gene Kelly, Dick York, Harry Morgan, Donna Anderson, Claude Akins, Noah Beery Jr., Florence Eldridge, Jimmy Boyd and Gordon Polk.
George Washington Rappleyea was an American metallurgical engineer and the manager of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company in Dayton, Tennessee. He held this position in the summer of 1925 when he became the chief architect of the Scopes trial. During a meeting at Robinson's Drug Store, it was Rappleyea who convinced a group of Dayton businessmen to sponsor a test case of the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in the state's schools. Rappleyea is held responsible for convincing John T. Scopes to be the defendant in the famous "Monkey" Trial.
Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial is a 2006 novel written by American author Ronald Kidd. The story is set in summer 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, and is based on the Scopes Trial.
John Randolph Neal Jr. was an American attorney, law professor, politician, and activist, best known for his role as chief counsel during the 1925 Scopes Trial, and as an advocate for the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1920s and 1930s. He also taught law at the University of Denver and the University of Tennessee, and served in the Tennessee state legislature. He was a candidate for governor or senator numerous times between 1912 and 1954.
Throughout the history of the United States, various topics have been censored and banned in education, including teaching about evolution, racism, sexism, sex education, and LGBTQ+ topics. Due to the federal system of the country being highly decentralized, states are delegated with much of the responsibility for administering public education, and it is often governments of the red states that have enacted such policies.
