March 21, 1925: The Butler Act is enacted.
Tennessee’s infamous Butler Act forbade the state’s public school teachers from teaching students any other explanation for the origins of the human species other than that found in the Bible, in the book of Genesis. The act’s reach extended even to state universities, and it explicitly banned (in the very first line) the teaching of the “Evolutionary Theory”/the theory of man’s descent from “a lower order of animals”. Violators of the new law would be charged with a misdemeanor and, if convicted, would be fined between $100 and $500.
The most famous violator of this law was John Scopes, a biology teacher who agreed to allow himself to be arrested in order to challenge the law on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was searching for a test case to determine the constitutionality of the law, and found it in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, sometimes called the Scopes Monkey Trial. The trial was highly-publicized and fascinated the America of the Roaring Twenties, when jazz music and flappers existed alongside the remnants of old Victorian morals. William Jennings Bryan (a politician most active in the late 1800s and early 1900s) representing the prosecution and Clarence Darrow representing the defense - a veritable battle for opposing values, a clash between old and new, science and anti-intellectualism, fundamentalism and modernism.
The law stood until 1967 until its repeal after another Tennessee teacher filed a suit, citing the First Amendment and freedom of speech.