Judge John Neal, counsel for J.T. Scopes:

1
Judge John Neal, counsel for J.T. Scopes

• I am not concerned and do not intend to attempt
  to prove whether the human species originated
  from protoplasm or from a one-cell living
  organism or from the Garden of EdenI am not
  interested in the opposing theories of whether
  man originated by special act of creation or by
  slow evolution and natural selection. The only
  question at stake is whether the State has the
  right to prohibit the mind from inquiring into
  these theories and whether education along these
  lines shall be stoppedMr. Bryan will debate
  alone on the question of evolution. I am
  upholding the right of free speech, free thought
  and freedom of religious opinion.
• Excerpted from Courts to Test Right of State to
  Bar Darwinism, Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1925,
  p.1.

2
William Jennings Bryan on majority rule in school
curriculum

• weve got a lot of mind worshipers in this
  country, information coming from sources of
  unquestioned authority show a shocking decline in
  the spiritual life of our schools and colleges.
  On the word of a well-known scientist the belief
  in a personal God and a personal immortality is
  dying out
• The Church must not be made a social club. You
  may not applaud sentiment like this, but if you
  put the hypotheses of science above the word of
  God I dont expect you to tolerate me.
• There are about 5000 scientists, and probably
  half of them are atheists, in the United States.
  Are we going to allow them to run our schools?
  We are not
• The hand that writes the teachers pay check is
  the hand that rules the schools.
• excerpted from Presbyterians Applaud Bryan, Los
  Angeles Times, May 13, 1925, p.2.

3
Document Set 2 Faith in Science vs. Faith in
Religion

• Key issues
• Antievolutionists
• contention that Darwinism lacked proof
• belief that evolution undermined childrens
  morality and faith if Bible was not literally
  true, Christianity lost its moral credibility
• Modernists
• (especially Mencken Darrow) ridicule of
  fundamentalism, especially biblical literalism
• Modernist faith in science and scientific method
  (expert knowledge) downside belief in
  eugenics
• Other
• Religious moderates (and modernists) left out of
  debate
• Long Beach USD scientists Robert Millikan
  (physicist) David Starr Jordan (evolutionary
  biologist) were members of the LA-based Science
  League. They maintained that religion and
  evolution were not in conflict

4
William Jennings Bryans statement to citizens of
Dayton on the eve of the trial

• The Bible is our only standard of morality. It
  gives us our only conception of God and our only
  knowledge of Christ. Anything that attacks the
  Bible attacks revealed religion. A successful
  attack would destroy the Bible and with it
  revealed religion.
• The contest between evolution and Christianity
  is a duel to the death...If evolution wins,
  Christianity goesnot suddenly, of course, but
  gradually, for the two cannot stand together.
  They are as antagonistic as light and darkness,
  good and evil.
• The atheists, agnostics and all other opponents
  of Christianity understand the character of the
  struggle, hence the interest in this
  caseBelieving that revealed religion offers
  mankind the truthChristians will fight evolution
  as their only great foe. If they are wrong, they
  will, of course, be defeated and in their defeat
  will be compelled to abandon the Bible as the
  word of God
• Christianity is not afraid of the truth. It
  only opposes hypothesis put forth in the name of
  science and unsupported by facts.
• Excerpted from Philip Kinsley, Bryan Keen for
  Battle, Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1925, p. 1.

5
H.L. Mencken on religion and religious freedom in
the wake of the Scopes Trial

• The way to deal with superstition is not to be
  polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and
  so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever
  infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance,
  cherished by persons who should know better? Then
  their folly should be brought out into the light
  of day, and exhibited there in all its
  hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their
  heads in shame.
• True enough, even a superstitious man has
  certain inalienable rights. He has a right to
  harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he
  pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict
  them upon other men by force. He has a right to
  argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season
  and out of season. He has a right to teach them
  to his children. But certainly he has no right to
  be protected against the free criticism of those
  who do not hold them. He has no right to demand
  that they be treated as sacred. He has no right
  to preach them without challenge.
• What should be a civilized man's attitude toward
  such superstitions? It seems to me that the only
  attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If
  he admits that they have any intellectual dignity
  whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If
  he pretends to a respect for those who believe in
  them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to
  their level. When he is challenged he must answer
  honestly, regardless of tender feelings.
• H.L. Mencken, Aftermath, The Baltimore Evening
  Sun, September 14, 1925

6
George W. Hunter describes evolution and eugenics
in A Civic Biology (1914), the book used by John
Scopes in his Dayton, TN classroom

• Eugenics
• Improvement of man If the stock of domesticated
  animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask
  if the health and vigor of the future generations
  of men and women on earth might not be improved
  by applying to them the laws of selection. This
  improvement of the future race has a number of
  factors in which we as individuals may play a
  part. These are personal hygiene, selection of
  healthy mates, and the betterment of the
  environment.
• Eugenics. When people marry there are certain
  things that the individual as well as the race
  should demand. The most important of these is
  freedom from germ diseases which might be handed
  down to the offspringThe science of being well
  born is called eugenics.
• Parasitism and its cost to society. Hundreds of
  families described in prior section as having
  mental and moral defects exist today,
  spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all
  parts of the country. The cost to society of
  such families is very severe. Just as certain
  animals or plants become parasitic on other
  plants or animals, these families have become
  parasitic on society. They not only do harm to
  others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading
  disease, but they are actually protected and
  cared for by the state out of public money.
  Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum
  exist. They take from society, but they give
  nothing in return. They are true parasites.
• Excerpted from Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes
  Trial A Brief History with Documents, pp.186-8.

7
Document Set 3 Provincialism vs. Cosmopolitan
Values/ Rural vs. Urban Values

• Key issues
• as journalist Joseph Wood Krutch notes that the
  events in Dayton are more part of the folklore
  of liberalism than of history (Larson, 244) in
  this tale, the the light of reasonbanished
  religious obscurantism (Larson, 246)
• Scopes listed as an instance of intolerance
  alongside Red Scare, KKK, immigration quotas in
  historiography of 1950s
• Fundamentalism linked to rural South believed by
  secularists to have disappeared fundamentalism
  associated with anti-modernism

8
H.L. Menckens obituary for William Jennings
Bryan, who died three days after the conclusion
of the Scopes Trial

• William Jennings Bryan, in his malice,
  started something that will not be easy to stop.
  In ten thousand country town his old heelers, the
  evangelical pastors, are propagating his gospel,
  and everywhere the yokels are ready for it. When
  he disappeared from the big cities, the big
  cities made the capital error of assuming that he
  was done for. If they heard of him at all, it was
  only as a crimp for real-estate speculators--the
  heroic foe of the unearned increment hauling it
  in with both hands. He seemed preposterous, and
  hence harmless. But all the while he was busy
  among his old lieges, preparing for a jacquerie
  that should floor all his enemies at one blow. He
  did the job competently. He had vast skill at
  such enterprises. Heave an egg out of a Pullman
  window, and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost
  anywhere in the United States today. They swarm
  in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors,
  and with a saint, now, to venerate. They are
  thick in the mean streets behind the gasworks.
  They are everywhere that learning is to heavy a
  burden for mortal works. They are everywhere that
  learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds,
  even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in
  little red schoolhouses. They march with the
  Klan, with the Christian Endeavor Society, with
  the Junior Order of United American Mechanics,
  with the Epworth League, with all the rococo
  bands that poor and unhappy folk organize to
  bring some light of purpose into their lives.
  They have had a thrill, and they are ready for
  more.
• - H.L. Mencken, American Mercury, October 1925.
  Excerpted from The American Mercury Reader,
  edited by Lawrence E. Spivak and Charles Angoff
  (Garden City, NY Blue Ribbon Books, 1944.