John Washington Butler, a Primitive Baptist and admirer of William Jennings Bryan, was a prosperous farmer, thresher operator, and community leader in Macon County who represented Macon, Trousdale, and Sumner Counties in the Tennessee House of Representatives (1923–27). As a member of the House of Representatives, he served on a state legislative committee charged to oversee schools directly operated by the state, and he discovered that some schools used textbooks teaching Darwinism.
In 1925 he introduced a bill in the Tennessee Legislature that prohibited the teaching of evolution in schools in Tennessee. UT President Harcourt Morgan was urged to take the leadership in opposing the bill. Morgan, although he was an evolutionist, declined, which prompted a harangue from alumnus Joseph Wood Krutch: “It never occurs to him to ask whether his chief duty might not possibly be something other than wrangling money from a cowardly legislature.”
UT students circulated a petition calling for several additional laws the state needed: “that the law of gravity be amended”; “change Pi from 3.1416 to an even 3”; “make it illegal to teach that the world is round, the Book of Revelation having clearly made reference to the four corners of the earth”; “eliminate flappers”; and “prohibit Fords from entering Tennessee.” In the spring circus parade, five of twelve UT floats ridiculed the “monkey law.” The bill was signed into law by Governor Austin Peay and was not repealed until 1967. A test case was brought in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925, but the local or appellate court did not rule the bill unconstitutional.