Today 100 Years Ago: Headlines from May 3, 1925

Looking Back a Century

Every morning in 2025 feels like history is speeding past us, but step back exactly one hundred years and the news cycle was already buzzing with ideas that still echo today. On (or within a whisker of) May 3 , 1925, the quiet town of Dayton, Tennessee lit the fuse for a courtroom drama that would put science, religion, and academic freedom on trial before the entire world.

1. Dayton, Tennessee – A Substitute Teacher Says “I’ll Do It”

4 May 1925
What began as a friendly challenge over soda fountains in Dayton’s drug-store became headline history the very next day. Local civic boosters, scheming to put their sleepy railroad town on the map, wanted someone—anyone—to deliberately break Tennessee’s brand-new Butler Act, which banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. Twenty-four-year-old substitute teacher and football coach John T. Scopes raised his hand.

Eyewitnesses recalled Scopes leaning over the counter at Robinson’s Drug Store, chuckling that he “could probably teach a chapter on Darwin” if the town really wanted a test case. By the evening of May 4, a warrant was quietly prepared; by May 5 he would be under arrest, setting the stage for what journalists soon dubbed the “Monkey Trial.”

Why It Mattered

• The Scopes Trial (July 1925) became a media circus, broadcast live by radio—then a marvel of mass communication.
• Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan’s showdown turned Dayton into ground zero for America’s debate over science vs. scripture.
• The verdict fined Scopes only $100, but the cultural argument has never really closed.

2025 Side-Glance

A century later we’re still wrestling with classroom controversies—only now they’re about climate change syllabi or whether AI-generated essays count as “original work.” The Scopes episode reminds us that the heartbeat of democracy is often the right to ask uncomfortable questions.

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