Butler Act
| Butler Act | |
|---|---|
| AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof | |
| Enacted by | the 64th Tennessee General Assembly |
| Date enacted | March 21, 1925 |
| Introduced by |
John Washington Butler in the House of Representatives as House Bill No. 185 on January 21, 1925 |
| Repealing legislation | |
| September 1, 1967 by Chapter No. 237, House Bill No. 48 | |
John Washington Butler in the House of Representatives as House Bill No. 185 on January 21, 1925
The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the Biblical account of man's origin. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 (Education) Section 1922, having been signed into law by Tennessee governor Austin Peay. 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 challenged later that year in a famous trial in Dayton, Tennessee called the Scopes trial which included a raucous confrontation between prosecution attorney and fundamentalist religious leader, William Jennings Bryan, and noted defense attorney and religious agnostic, Clarence Darrow.
The law, "An act prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof" (Tenn. HB 185, 1925) specifically provided:
It additionally outlined that an offending teacher would be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined between $100 and $500 for each offense.
By the terms of the statute, it could be argued, it was not illegal to teach evolution in respect to non-human creatures, such as that apes descended from protozoa or to teach the mechanisms of variation and natural selection. The bill also did not touch on, or restrict the teaching of prevailing scientific theories of geology or the age of the Earth. It did not even require that the Genesis story be taught, but prohibited solely the teaching that man evolved, or any other theory denying that man was created by God as recorded in Genesis. However the author of the law, a Tennessee farmer named John Washington Butler, specifically intended that it would prohibit the teaching of evolution. He later was reported to have said, "No, I didn't know anything about evolution when I introduced it. I'd read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense." After reading copies of William Jennings Bryan's lecture "Is the Bible True?" as well as Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Butler decided the teaching of evolution was dangerous.
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