On July 21, 1925, a jury in Dayton, Tennessee, found John T. Scopes guilty of teaching evolution. The case has become so familiar that it is easy to reduce it to a historical curiosity: Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, Darwin, religion and a small Southern town thrust into the center of the nation’s attention.
But Scopes was not convicted merely because Americans disagreed about evolution. He was convicted because Tennessee had decided one side of that disagreement could not be taught in a public classroom. The state used political power to establish the boundaries of acceptable knowledge.
That distinction carries the enduring warning of Scopes: Once government claims the power to control what may be taught, it also claims power over the boundaries of acceptable thought. One hundred and one years later, that warning remains alive.
The subjects and political coalitions have changed. Human nature has not. There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the desire of those in power to control what others may hear, read, teach or believe.
Today, that impulse often begins with an accusation: indoctrination. Once an idea is branded as indoctrination, restricting it can sound like protection rather than control.
There is a legitimate concern beneath the argument. No teacher or professor should require political allegiance as the price of an education, and no student should be compelled to accept an ideological belief because an authority figure demands it. But the argument begins to collapse when government appoints itself the judge of what constitutes indoctrination.
At that point, government is no longer simply preventing coercion. It is deciding which ideas are acceptable, which interpretations are suspect and which beliefs may be endorsed. The problem is no longer indoctrination. It is who gets to define it.
Alabama has entered that struggle directly. In 2024, the Legislature enacted a law prohibiting state agencies, local boards of education and public universities from compelling students or employees to affirm what the law defines as “divisive concepts.” The law also restricts certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The statute contains safeguards. Public universities may discuss the designated concepts objectively and without endorsement. The law permits historically accurate teaching and expressly protects First Amendment rights and academic freedom.
Those protections matter, but the larger concern remains. The Legislature has defined a category of ideas and established limits on how public institutions may address them.
That danger is easy to overlook when those exercising the power are politically agreeable. Political control changes hands, but government authority survives. Power created to protect one generation from ideas it fears can become the power another generation uses against ideas the first considered essential. Civil liberties cannot safely depend on who won the last election.
There is a deeper problem with establishing acceptable thought through law: Human knowledge has never worked that way. Religious traditions disagree over theology and morality. Philosophers have argued for centuries about justice, liberty and truth. Science relies on evidence and testing, but scientific understanding changes as new evidence emerges.
None of that means truth is whatever someone chooses to believe. Quite the opposite. Truth must be pursued, not legislated.
That distinction matters in an era that produced the phrase “alternative facts.” Americans increasingly inhabit different informational worlds. Evidence accepted in one political community is dismissed as propaganda in another. People treat expertise as partisan and too often judge facts by whether they advance a preferred political narrative.
That is intellectual chaos, but giving politicians the power to define acceptable thought does not solve it. It gives one faction the power to declare itself correct.
The dispute extends beyond Alabama. The Trump administration has challenged how the Smithsonian Institution and other federal historical sites present American history. A 2025 executive order accused cultural institutions of replacing objective history with ideology and called for federal historical presentations emphasizing American achievements and progress.
Supporters regard that as a correction. They argue that some institutions focus so heavily on racism, oppression and national failures that they distort the American story. That concern deserves consideration. American history is also a record of extraordinary achievement, emancipation, expanded suffrage, innovation and repeated efforts to extend the country’s promises.
But neither version is the whole story. A nation cannot honestly celebrate emancipation without teaching slavery. The civil rights movement cannot be understood without Jim Crow. The expansion of voting rights means little without an understanding of how those rights were denied.
American progress becomes more meaningful when the obstacles to that progress are told honestly. Patriotism that requires leaving out the ugly parts of history is not patriotism. It is public relations.
Then history produced an extraordinary coincidence. On July 21, 2026—exactly 101 years after the Scopes verdict—the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History appeared before a congressional subcommittee at a hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past.”
In 1925, the argument centered on what a teacher could say about humanity’s origins. In 2026, it centered on how the nation’s principal history museum should tell the story of America itself. The controversies are not equivalent, but beneath both lies the same enduring question: Who decides?
That question does not mean every idea deserves equal standing. Intellectual freedom does not require evolutionary biology and creationism to be presented as scientifically equivalent. Nor does it require Holocaust denial to be treated as a legitimate interpretation of history. Evidence, expertise, standards and facts matter. But those things are not political orthodoxy.
The purpose of education is not to produce people who know which answers authority expects. It is to produce people capable of examining evidence, recognizing propaganda, challenging assumptions and changing their minds when facts require it.
Difficult history belongs in classrooms because someone will eventually try to distort it. Competing ideas belong there because intellectual strength comes from confronting arguments, not being protected from them. A society that cannot tolerate disagreement risks treating disagreement itself as dangerous.
The Tennessee lawmakers who prohibited the teaching of evolution did not consider themselves enemies of freedom. They believed they were protecting children, faith and the moral order of their communities. That is precisely what makes the Scopes warning relevant more than a century later.
Restrictions on freedom rarely arrive announcing themselves as such. They are more often presented as protection—from dangerous ideas, offensive books, false history or indoctrination. Government sometimes has a legitimate duty to protect, but that claim cannot end the examination of what power government is assuming and where it may lead.
The answer to bad history is better history. The answer to weak ideas is stronger ideas. The answer to false claims is evidence. And the answer to indoctrination cannot be an official version of truth approved by whichever political faction happens to hold power.
There is nothing new under the sun. Every generation believes its fears are unprecedented and its political opponents uniquely dangerous. Every generation faces the temptation to narrow freedom because those doing the narrowing are certain they are right.
That temptation was present in Dayton in 1925. It is present in Montgomery and Washington today.
A free society can demand evidence, insist on standards and reject coercion. What it cannot safely do is give political power authority over the boundaries of acceptable thought.
The enduring warning of Scopes is not simply that Tennessee was wrong about evolution. It is that government became convinced it had the right to decide which ideas were safe enough for others to encounter.
Once political power assumes that authority, the greatest danger is not merely what today’s leaders want taught.
It is what tomorrow’s leaders may decide no one should be allowed to know.
