An Anti-Evolution League holds a books sales at the opening of the Scopes"Monkey" Trial in which biology teacher John T. Scopes is being prosecuted for teaching evolution in his classn December of 1924, a Tennessee state representative—a tobacco and corn farmer named John Washington Butler—sat down before the fireplace in his Macon County home and wrote a 197-word bill that changed history.
It’s hard now to overstate the fame of the two men who faced off in the courtroom as personifications of the opposing sides. But the battle between the iconoclastic attorney Clarence Darrow and the populist hero William Jennings Bryan was the stuff of legend even before it officially began. “They’ll Roast Mr. Darrow as a Side Order” ran one headline. Bryan himself hyped the contest as “a duel to the death.
But if you like to watch people try, if you enjoy seeing men interrupt one another, shake their heads in disbelief, and sputter , then treat yourself toKen Ham giving Bill Nye a tour of the “Ark Encounter,” the creationist theme park in Kentucky . As they stroll past a diorama of a dinosaur on Noah’s ark, the apparent animosity between these two people makes Dayton, circa 1925, seem almost quaint.
At the end of Scopes trial, in one of the more dramatic scenes in courtroom history, Darrow maneuvered Bryan himself onto the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. With feigned incredulity, Darrow asked whether Bryan hadn’t ever tried to learn about older and other civilizations. Bryan answered, “No, sir, I have been so well satisfied with the Christian religion that I have spent no time trying to find argument against it.