Today: Headlines from 6 May 1925

Today 100 Years Ago – 6 May 1925

A century feels like a heartbeat in the long rhythm of history. On this spring Wednesday in 1925 the world was humming with new ideas, bold designs, and a clash between modern science and old-time religion. Let’s step back and read the front page.

1. Tennessee Schoolteacher Arrested for Teaching Evolution

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Yesterday, 5 May 1925, a 24-year-old football-coach-turned-substitute-teacher named John T. Scopes was quietly escorted from Rhea County High School to the red-brick courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. His “crime”: explaining Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to a classroom of teenagers—an act outlawed two months earlier by the state’s new Butler Act.

• Local businessmen, eager to put their sleepy town on the map, had invited the American Civil Liberties Union to test the law. Scopes volunteered, admitting he had used a state-approved biology textbook that mentioned evolution.
• By sundown, wire reports carried the story nationwide. Fundamentalists cheered; urban scientists fumed. The stage was set for The Scopes “Monkey” Trial—a courtroom drama that, come July, will pit famed orator William Jennings Bryan against agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow under a blistering Tennessee sun.

2025 Lens: We stream TED Talks on genetics with a tap of a phone; in 1925, even mentioning human evolution could make you a felon. The debate over what belongs in a science classroom still flares up a century later, but few teachers risk handcuffs for teaching accepted biology.

2. Paris Glitters at the Art Déco World’s Fair

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Across the Atlantic, the City of Light is dazzling visitors at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, now one week old and drawing record crowds on this 6 May afternoon. From the geometric ironwork of the Porte d’Honneur to the sleek teak interiors of luxury ocean-liner pavilions, the fair is a full-scale manifesto for what journalists are already calling Art Déco.

• More than 15,000 exhibitors from 20 countries are showing off jazzy motifs, chrome fixtures, and tropical hardwoods—material proof that ornament can be modern.
• Coco Chanel floats by in a simple black dress, while architect Le Corbusier storms out, declaring the extravaganza “modernity in costume jewelry.”
• The fair will influence everything from New York skyscrapers to Shanghai dance halls; even the 2025 electric cars lining our streets owe their streamlined silhouettes to the aesthetics born here.

2025 Lens: Today we 3-D-print furniture and binge-watch retro-futurist design reels on social media. Yet the craving for objects that feel both new and glamorous remains unchanged. In 1925, Paris sold the world a vision of elegance that still looks fresh on our smartwatch faces and subway stations.