John Washington Butler couldn't have agreed more. In January 1925, this second-term member of the Tennessee House of Representatives introduced a bill that would make it unlawful for teachers working in schools financed wholly or in part by the state to "teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible." Violation of the statute would constitute a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not less than $100 or more than $500 for each offense.

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Butler's bill flummoxed government observers but delighted its predominately Baptist backers, and it sailed through the Tennessee House on a lopsided 71 to 5 vote. It went on to the state Senate, where objections were more numerous, and where one member tried to kill the legislation by proposing an amendment to also "prohibit the teaching that the earth is round." Yet senators ultimately sanctioned the measure 24 to 6. As the story goes, many Tennessee lawmakers thought they were safe in voting for this "absurd" bill because Governor Austin Peay, a well-recognized progressive, was bound to veto it. However, Peay–in a prickly political trade-off that won him the support of rural representatives he needed in order to pass educational and infrastructural reforms–signed the Butler Act into law. As he did so, though, he noted that he had no intention of enforcing it. "Probably," the governor said in a special message to his Legislature, "the law will never be applied."

Peay's prediction might have come true, had not the ACLU chosen to make the statute a cause célèbre. Worried that other states would follow Tennessee's lead, the ACLU agreed in late April 1925 to guarantee legal and financial assistance to any teacher who would test the law.

John Scopes wasn't the obvious candidate. A gawky, 24-year-old Illinois native, he was still new to his job as a general science teacher and football coach at Rhea County Central High School. Yet his views on evolution were unequivocal. "I don't see how a teacher can teach biology without teaching evolution," Scopes insisted, adding that the state-approved science textbook included lessons in evolution. And he was a vocal supporter of academic freedom and freedom of thought. Yet Scopes was reluctant to participate in the ACLU's efforts until talked into it by Dayton neighbors who hoped that a prominent local trial would stimulate prosperity in their sleepy southeastern Tennessee town.

On May 7, Scopes was officially arrested for violating Tennessee's anti-evolution statute. Less than a week later, William Jennings Bryan accepted an invitation from the World's Christian Fundamentals Association to assist in Scopes' prosecution.

No one who knew the 65-year-old Bryan well should have been surprised by his involvement in the case. Bryan had been trained in the law before being elected as a congressman from Nebraska, and he made three spirited but unsuccessful runs at the presidency on the Democratic ticket. He had served as secretary of state during President Woodrow Wilson's first term but had spent the last decade writing and lecturing more often about theology than politics. With the same silver tongue he'd once used to excoriate Republican office seekers and decry U.S. involvement in World War I, Bryan had since promoted religious ethics over man's exaltation of science. "It is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of the rocks," Bryan pronounced; "It is better for one to know that he is close to the Heavenly Father than to know how far the stars in the heavens are apart." Ever the rural populist– "the Great Commoner"–Bryan saw religion as the crucial backbone of agrarian America, and he reserved special enmity for accommodationists who struggled to reconcile Christianity and evolution. Such modernism, he wrote, "permits one to believe in a God, but puts the creative act so far away that reverence for the Creator is likely to be lost."

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