The Monkey Trial
Emily Larson
The Theory
Civil Liberties Union
Anti-Evolution League
The state of Tennessee passed a legislature that banned the teaching of Darwin's theory in all schools in the state.
The Butler Act
Prohibited public teachers from teachings denying the fact that the man's origin was Biblical.
Scopes vs Tennesse
Scopes a high school science teacher was arrested on May 7, 1925 for teaching the theory.
Darwin VS. Bryan
Media Circus with the Monkeys
The trial turned into a media circus. When the case was opened on July 14, journalists from across the land descended upon the mountain hamlet of Dayton. Preachers and fortune seekers filled the streets. Entrepreneurs sold everything from food to Bibles to stuffed monkeys. The trial became the first ever to be broadcast on radio.
Scopes himself played a rather small role in the case: the trial was reduced to a verbal contest between Darrow and Bryan. When Judge John Raulston refused to admit expert testimony on the validity of evolutionary theory, Darrow lost his best defense.
He decided that if he was not permitted to validate Darwin, his best shot was to attack the literal interpretation of the Bible. The climax of the trial came when Darrow asked Bryan to take the stand as an expert on the Bible. Darrow hammered Bryan with tough questions on his strict acceptance of several Bible's stories from the creation of Eve from Adam's rib to the swallowing of Jonah by a whale.
In the following famous excerpt from the trial transcript, Darrow questions Bryan about the flood described in the Bible's book of Genesis.