A Teacher Taught Science

“Those who believed in the letter of the Bible and refused to accept any teaching, even of science, which seemed to conflict with it, began in 1921 to call themselves Fundamentalists…The position of the Fundamentalists seemed almost hopeless. The tide of all rational thought in a rational age seemed to be running against them. But they were numerous, and at least there was no doubt about where they stood. Particularly in the South they controlled the big Protestant denominations. And they fought strenuously…They introduced into the legislatures of nearly half the states of the Union bills designed to forbid the teaching of the doctrine of evolution; in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Carolina they pushed such bills through one house of the legislature only to fail in the other; and in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Mississippi they actually succeeded in writing their anachronistic wishes into law.”

“There was something to be said for the right of the people to decide what should be taught in their tax-supported schools, even if what they decided upon was ridiculous.”

“The evidence ranged all the way from the admission of fourteen-year-old Howard Morgan that Scopes had told him about evolution and that it hadn’t hurt him any, to the estimate of a zoologist that life had begun something like six hundred million years ago (an assertion which caused gasps and titters of disbelief from the rustics in the audience).”

“…[Clarence] Darrow declared that his purpose in examining [William Jennings] Bryan was ‘to show up Fundamentalism…to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States.’” 

With regard to the Scopes-Monkey Trial

From Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, published 1931