Episode transcript coming soon

Dayton lies at the Western edge of the Cumberland plateau, where the low plains of the Mississippi begin to rise up into the heights of the Appalachians. A couple of miles away is the right bank of the Tennessee river, winding down from the mountains in ever-slower meanders towards the great expanse of the Mississippi.

The English businessman Titus Salt Jr. had selected this obscure location, amid the abundant Appalachian coalfield as a site for his ironworks, and the town briefly prospered, expanding from a small crossroads settlement to a great array of mines and blast furnaces. But after just a few years, Salt's company went bust, and the Glaswegian Peter Donaldson stepped in. But Donaldson couldn't make it work either. The iron market collapsed, and Dayton Coal and Iron Company went bankrupt. The ironworks closed in 1913, and Donaldson returned to Glasgow. Not long afterwards, his body was recovered from the Clyde.

By 1925, the town was in bad shape. The Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, that had taken over what was left of the local iron industry after Donaldson pulled out, was on its last legs. With locals moving away to find work in places where there actually was work to be found, the population had reduced by almost half. But in that sweltering summer, among the decaying remains of the industry that had brought prosperity just a couple of generations earlier, America's attention was drawn to the Rhea County Courthouse.

For the prosecution, there was William Jennings Bryan, a major figure in American political history. Originally from Southern Illinois, he'd moved west to the Prairies and set up a legal practice in Lincoln, Nebraska. He got involved with campaigning for the Democratic party, and his talent for charismatic and impassioned rhetoric managed to get him elected to the House of Representatives in 1890, campaigning for popular, anti-elitist causes like a national income tax and an end to the Gold Standard, championing the interests of the farmers of the Great Plains, something that earned him the nickname of The Great Commoner. He won the Democratic nomination in the 1896 presidential election, but lost the election to the Republican William McKinley. After fighting in the Spanish-American War, he ran against McKinley again in 1900, and lost again. He had another go in 1908, but lost a third time, this time to William Howard Taft. And then in 1912 Woodrow Wilson appointed him as Secretary of State. Passionately committed to American neutrality in the First World War, he resigned in 1915 as it became increasingly obvious Wilson wanted to enter the war.

No longer holding any political offices, Bryan nonetheless remained a committed activist, supporting causes like a right to strike, a minimum wage, and women's suffrage. As a movement for prohibition gained momentum, he became one of that movement's champions, and as time went on he began to devote his remarkable rhetorical ability more and more to promoting his religious views, restarting his legal career to end up here.

And for the defence, there was Clarence Darrow. While there are many historical figures who did, at some point in their lives, practice law - William Jennings Bryan is one example, but also people like Mohandas Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln - Clarence Darrow is one of relatively few of these who's actually primarily known as a lawyer. Like Bryan, Darrow was a Democrat, and involved in politics, although at a lower level, and spent two years as a representative in the Illinois State Legislature, but unlike Bryan, who spent most of his career as a politician, Darrow was primarily a lawyer.

Like William Jennings Bryan, Darrow earned a reputation as a champion of workers' rights. In 1894, he abandoned a career as a lawyer for the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company to defend the trade unionist Eugene V. Debs, on trial for his role in organising industrial action at the Pullman Company. The same year, he defended a man who had assassinated the mayor of Chicago, unsuccessfully attempting an insanity defence.

He took on a range of high profile cases to do with labour activism. Perhaps most notably in 1905, a former Governor of Idaho was murdered by a miner who had a complicated and confusing relationship with organised labour, and had attempted to incriminate several high profile labour organisers, including Big Bill Haywood. In a sensational trial, Darrow got everyone except the actual murderer acquitted. And then in 1911, he defended the McNamara brothers, members of the Iron Workers Union, who had planted a bomb at the Los Angeles Times building that ended up killing 21 people. Darrow's reputation in the labour movement suffered when he advised the defendants to plead guilty, rather than risk the death penalty. He was also accused of attempting to bribe a juror and went to trial himself. He was acquitted, and was able to continue his legal career. His most sensational case of all came in 1924, when he defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two University of Chicago students from wealthy backgrounds, on trial for the gruesome and sadistic murder of the 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Darrow spoke for 8 hours at the sentencing hearing, appealing to the youth and immaturity of the defendants, and the immorality of the death penalty in principle - and his clients ended up avoiding execution.

But anyway, all this led to a rift between people who thought the Bible had to be interpreted completely literally, and therefore Darwin must be wrong, and people who allowed for parts of it to be interpreted more figuratively. The idea that the Bible shouldn't be taken completely literally about absolutely everything wasn't a new one, and went all the way back to early Christian writers such as Origen. And over the 18th and 19th Centuries, new discoveries in geology, and the realisation that fossils were indeed the remains of extinct life forms from the distant past, made it increasingly absurd for someone with a scientific education to claim that the entire universe was created over a period of six days from the 23rd to the 28th of October 4004 BCE. Compromise positions emerged, particularly Day-Age Creationism, where the “days” mentioned in the book of Genesis actually refer to much longer periods. This was actually the position of William Jennings Bryan. There’s also Gap Creationism, which takes advantage of the fact that Genesis never explicitly says how long it was between God creating the world and God saying “let there be light”, to start the six days of Creation.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."

According to Gap Creationists, the period where "The Earth was formless and empty", could have lasted millions or billions of years, plenty of time for geological processes to take place before the first day.

But Evolution by Natural Selection, and especially its application to humans, are more problematic. It's very important to Christian theology that humans, and only humans, have souls, and free will, and all that, and can go to Heaven or Hell. Humans have to be different, in an important way, from other animals, and if humans emerged from other animals by a series of random processes, then that becomes awkward.

Of course, nowadays most educated Christians actually do believe in Evolution, and I think the most normal position is that God used evolution as a mechanism to create life, including humans. There's nothing stopping God creating the physical bodies of humans through evolution, and also creating human souls to put in them.

A theistic sort of guided evolution, where evolution does not occur by purely random processes, but is instead guided by God was a very popular compromise in the early days of evolution. This was often combined with a sort of Lamarckian approach to evolution, where organisms pass on acquired characteristics. As the name suggests, this sort of evolution was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and predated Darwin's theory of Natural Selection by several decades. It had been a controversial fringe theory previously, but Darwin's discoveries made it difficult to dispute that evolution happened, and now the ordered purposefulness of Lamarckian evolution, that left a potential guiding role for God, seemed like the more moderate option compared to the brutal random chaos of a strictly Darwinian model of evolution.

And the requirement for random mutations to be inherited was a bit of a problem for Darwin's theory in its early days. How did this even happen? Darwin's own suggestion - very much just a guess - was that maybe each part of the body sends particles called gemmules to the reproductive organs, and then they can be used to make new copies of that body part. Interestingly enough, if anything this supports a more Lamarckian view of evolution, where an organ's gemmules encode features that it has acquired in life, and doesn't really explain the random mutations needed for natural selection. Anyway, in the 1860s the Austrian Friar Gregor Mendel did a series of experiments to do with cross-breeding pea plants, noticing that they inherited characteristics from one or the other of their parents according to various rules, rather than inheriting traits that were intermediate between the parents, and in doing so is often considered to have discovered the concept of genetics. Nobody paid much attention, but in the 1890s, Hugo de Vries made similar discoveries, coined the term gene (or at least pangene, after Darwin's Pangenesis hypothesis. The abbreviation would come later), and also noticed that sometimes plants would end up with random traits that didn't seem to be inherited from either parent, and then pass these on (he called these mutations). This was confirmation of the mechanism needed for Natural Selection to actually work.

Other experiments in the early 20th century pretty conclusively ruled out Lamarckian Evolution, for example August Weismann cutting the tails off mice and observing that, after five generations of a family of mice all having their tails cut off, they were still being born with completely normal tails. His theory that heritable genetic information is entirely contained within the reproductive cells, and can't be affected by changes to other parts of the body, held up.

As well as mechanisms of inheritance, another apparent early problem for Darwin's theory, regularly employed as a counterargument by Creationists, was that it predicted the existence of missing links in the fossil record - fossils of extinct animals intermediate between modern species - whose descendants would have gone on to diverge into a range of distinct creatures. Creationists regularly cited (and indeed continue to cite) the absence of these missing links as evidence against evolution, while evolutionists were keen to point out that plenty of these missing links actually had been found. The impressively detailed record of the development of horses was often talked about at the time. Humans - the most important part of this whole debate - had fewer known missing link fossils. Far more early hominid fossils have been discovered now than in 1925, but even then there was the skull discovered in 1856 by miners near Düsseldorf in the valley (or Thal in German) of the Neander river. In the early 1890s, there was another skullcap, and a thighbone, found in Eastern Java. The expedition leader, Eugene Dubois, christened it Anthropopithecus erectus - "upright man-ape", in a mixture of Latin and Greek. It's now known as the much more linguistically coherent Homo erectus. Then there was a jawbone discovered in the village of Mauer, near Heidelberg, in 1908 - Homo heidelbergensis. And in 1924, workers at a limestone quarry near Taung in South Africa found a fossilized ape skull, that Raymond Dart identified as an extremely early hominin species - Australopithecus africanus - the "African Southern Ape". And let's not forget Piltdown Man - presented in 1912 by Charles Dawson, whose track record of improbable archaeological discoveries (my favourite of which was a mummified toad, supposedly found encased in a flint nodule), had earned him the nickname 'The Wizard of Sussex'. He produced fragments of a skull that he said had been found by a worker in a gravel pit near Piltdown, East Sussex. Various luminaries of palaeontology were absolutely convinced that this was a missing link between humans and the rest of the apes. Some people were suspicious, but it was largely accepted by the scientific establishment as genuine. It wasn't until the 1950s that it was conclusively proven with fluorine absorption dating that it was in fact a regular modern human skull from the middle ages, with an orangutan’s jawbone and chimpanzee teeth that had been filed down.

In 1925, evolutionists were proudly presenting Piltdown Man as a conclusive example of a missing link between humans and other apes, but excluding this embarrassing example, there was still plenty of evidence for intermediate stages in the evolution of humans from earlier apes. I should also note that the creationists were no less credulous. Creationist arguments were more often that there was no particular reason to believe that this extinct ape was an ancestor of modern humans, rather than that the skull was actually a fake.

All these discoveries, even including Piltdown Man, meant that by the time we get to the 1920s, it was basically impossible for a serious naturalist not to accept Darwin's theory of the Evolution of all life, including humans, by Natural Selection.

And this overwhelming scientific consensus, as well as the fact that the theory had just been around for quite a while now, meant that Darwinian Evolution was becoming ubiquitous in school textbooks. And far more American children than ever before were going to school, too. A previous generation in smalltown Appalachia could simply have got on with their lives without ever really noticing an academic debate among naturalists and theologians, but now you've got your children coming home from school saying they've been learning about Charles Darwin and Evolution and how we're all descended from Monkeys. It was suddenly a serious concern for enough people that it could become a real issue of public policy.

Add to that, that throughout the last decade or so, various scientific advances and general changes in social attitudes had led to a split among American Protestants, into two factions that became known as Modernists, who believed churches should adapt to these changes, and that the Bible could be interpreted in such a way as to be compatible with modern science, and the Fundamentalists, who believed they shouldn't and it couldn't. By the 1920s, the Fundamentalists had specifically zoomed in on the controversy over Evolution as a critical, defining issue. Modernists believed you could be a Christian and believe that Humans are descended from apes, Fundamentalists believed this was impossible.

And this is where William Jennings Bryan comes in. After he resigned as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Bryan was effectively retired as a professional politician, and had plenty of time to devote to his own pet causes. Four constitutional amendments in a row: the 16th, introducing a progressive federal income tax, the 17th, guaranteeing direct election of senators, both in 1913, the 18th, banning alcohol, in 1919, and the 19th, in 1920, giving women the right to vote, were all causes that he'd specifically campaigned for. At earlier points he'd expressed, in passing, a vague disapproval of evolution, but now it became an obsession, and he became probably the most prominent spokesperson for an increasingly committed and organised anti-evolution movement.

Bryan's opposition to Evolution was certainly rooted partly in a belief that the Bible was exact, literal fact, but at the same time he also regarded the theory not a simply scientifically false but as profoundly immoral. The ruthless doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest was, in Bryan's view, starkly opposed to the ideal of Christian brotherhood. He saw it as a driving force behind the Imperialistic European ideologies that had led to the recent horrors of the First World War, especially blaming it for German militarism, and associated it with the plutocratic elite that he'd spent his political career standing up to, and the distant caprices of global capitalism that counted towns like Dayton among their victims.

His views on evolution are summed up in a series of lectures that he published as a book, particularly chapter 4, titled The Menace of Darwinism.

He attempts a few actual arguments with the facts of evolution. He points to an apparent lack of evidence for evolution, using arguments still used by creationists today:

"Darwin does not use facts; he uses conclusions drawn from similarities. He builds upon presumptions, probabilities and inferences, and asks the acceptance of his hypothesis "notwithstanding the fact that connecting links have not hitherto been discovered" (page 162). He advances an hypothesis which, if true, would find support on every foot of the earth's surface, but which, as a matter of fact, finds support nowhere. There are myriads of living creatures about us, from insects too small to be seen with the naked eye to the largest mammals, and, yet, not one is in transition from one species to another; every one is perfect."

He quotes several authorities, apparently supporting creationism, including this quote from a certain "Dr. Etheridge, Fossiologist of the British Museum", who apparently said

"Nine-tenths of the talk of Evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views."

Dr. Etheridge is presumably the palaeontologist Robert Etheridge, or possibly his son, also a palaeontologist called Robert Etheridge. The quote appears in a few late 19th and early 20th Century Creationist pamphlets and nowhere else. There's no other evidence that either Robert Etheridge was ever particularly opposed to the theory of evolution. Bryan's other citations are to two of the very few biologists who by the 20th century genuinely were still unambiguous anti-evolutionists, and to William Bateson, who he quoted not outright rejecting evolution as a whole, but saying "that science has faith in evolution but doubts as to the origin of species".

Bryan points out the seeming uncertainty of the language used by Darwin (obviously Darwin was using uncertain language. He was presenting a new theory that radically departed from scientific orthodoxy at the time. And much of the accumulation of evidence that would prove him right was only discovered after the fact, when scientists knew what theory they were trying to test).

"Before commenting on the Darwinian hypothesis let me refer you to the language of its author as it applies to man. On page 180 of 'Descent of Man' (Hurst & Company, Edition 1874), Darwin says:

"Our most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of the Vertebrata, at which we are able to obtain an obscure glance, apparently consisted of a group of marine animals, resembling the larvae of the existing Ascidians."

Then he suggests a line of descent leading to the monkey. And he does not even permit us to indulge in a patriotic pride of ancestry; instead of letting us descend from American monkeys, he connects us with the European branch of the monkey family.

"It will be noted, first, that he begins the summary with the word "apparently", which the Standard Dictionary defines: "as judged by appearances, without passing upon its reality." His second sentence (following the sentence quoted) turns upon the word "probably," which is defined: "as far as the evidence shows, presumably, likely." His works are full of words indicating uncertainty. The phrase "we may well suppose," occurs over eight hundred times in his two principal works. (See Herald & Presbyter, November 22, 1914.) The eminent scientist is guessing."

and later on:

"The word hypothesis is a synonym used by scientists for the word guess; it is more dignified in sound and more imposing to the sight, but it has the same meaning as the old-fashioned, everyday word, guess. If Darwin had described his doctrine as a guess instead of calling it an hypothesis, it would not have lived a year."

A lot of the arguments just appeal to incredulity, for example, at the series of chance mutations that would have to occur to produce something as sophisticated as an eye, or a leg.

"Well, the guess is that a little animal without legs was wiggling along on its belly one day when it discovered a wart - it just happened so - and it was in the right place to be used to aid it in locomotion; so, it came to depend upon the wart, and use finally developed it into a leg. And then another wart and another leg, at the proper time - by accident - and accidentally in the proper place. Is it not astonishing that any person intelligent enough to teach school would talk such tommyrot to students and look serious while doing so?"

and incredulity, too, at the idea of evolution producing the vast diversity of life we have today:

"Is it conceivable that the hawk and the hummingbird, the spider and the honey bee, the turkey gobbler and the mocking-bird, the butterfly and the eagle, the ostrich and the wren, the tree toad and the elephant, the giraffe and the kangaroo, the wolf and the lamb should all be the descendants of a common ancestor? Yet these and all other creatures must be blood relatives if man is next of kin to the monkey."

The main point of the chapter, though, is to deal with the dangers to society of teaching Darwinian Evolution. He blames it for a seeming decline in religiosity of society, saying that

"The hypothesis to which the name of Darwin has been given - the hypothesis that links man to the lower forms of life and makes him a lineal descendant of the brute - is obscuring God and weakening all the virtues that rest upon the religious tie between God and man."

He points to Darwin himself, very religious in his youth, to the point that the crew of the Beagle made fun of him for it, but whose religious faith was undermined by his own theory.

He devotes quite a lot of space to condemning eugenics as an especially depraved consequence of Darwin's theory - one that Darwin himself warned about:

"If hatred is the law of man's development; that is, if man has reached his present perfection by a cruel law under which the strong kill off the weak - then, if there is any logic that can bind the human mind, we must turn backward toward the brute if we dare to substitute the law of love for the law of hate. That is the conclusion that I reached and it is the conclusion that Darwin himself reached. On pages 149-50 he says:

"With savages the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the progress of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; our medical experts exert their utmost skill to save the lives of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from weak constitutions would have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.""

Bryan goes so far as to say that

"Civilization is measured by the moral revolt against the cruel doctrine developed by Darwin."

And he blames Darwinism, especially through its influence on the anti-Christian philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, for the ideology of German militarism that led to the First World War.

"In his book entitled "Joyful Wisdom”, Nietzsche ascribes to Napoleon the very same dream of power - Europe under one sovereign and that sovereign the master of the world - that lured the Kaiser into a sea of blood from which he emerged an exile seeking security under a foreign flag. Nietzsche names Darwin as one of the three great men of his century, but tries to deprive him of credit for the doctrine that bears his name by saying that Hegel made an earlier announcement of it. Nietzsche died hopelessly insane, but his philosophy has wrought the moral ruin of a multitude, if it is not actually responsible for bringing upon the world its greatest war.

His philosophy, if it is worthy the name of philosophy, is the ripened fruit of Darwinism—and a tree is known by its fruit."

Bryan quotes a 1900 article from L'Univers, elegantly expressing a similar idea well before the First World War had even started.

"The spirit of peace has fled the earth because evolution has taken possession of it. The plea for peace in past years has been inspired by faith in the divine nature and the divine origin of man; men were then looked upon as children of one Father and war, therefore, was fratricide. But now that men are looked upon as children of apes, what matters it whether they are slaughtered or not?"

Bryan engaged with scientists, too. He spent several months in an ongoing spat with Edward Asahel Birge, a geologist with a zoology PhD, who was president of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an example of the sort of thing he was saying, The Wisconsin State Journal, in 1922, reports him writing

"I may be mistaken in regard to the duty of the professor of a university but according to my views the salary is large enough to call for more than giving his students a monkey ancestry."

There was a similar thing with the eugenics-obsessed palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (who was quite some piece of work himself, believing, for instance, that humans couldn't possibly have originated in Africa, and that different human racial groups were in fact different species). Osborn's evidence of 'missing links' between apes and humans included not only real specimens like Neanderthals and Java Man (although not Taung Child, which would have been inconvenient for someone insistent humans originated outside Africa), but also Piltdown Man, who Osborn claimed as proof of the immense antiquity of superior European skull shape, and Nebraska Man, a controversial recent find of a tooth in Nebraska, said to have belonged to an early hominid, which, according to Osborn, proved that early man had lived in the Americas much longer than previously thought (it was already becoming increasingly clear that the tooth was in fact from a prehistoric variety of peccary).

William Jennings Bryan made his opinions on such cases abundantly clear in a 1923 speech to the West Virginia State Legislature, published as an article titled My Views on Evolution:

"If they find a stray tooth in a gravel, pit, they hold a conclave, and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses."

This is really just mockery, rather than a serious criticism, although you've got to admit that in cases like Piltdown man and Nebraska man, he kind of had a point. Prominent palaeontologists had indeed been making grand, ambitious claims on the basis of very flimsy evidence, and would be embarrassed when the evidence turned out to be complete nonsense. That said, Bryan also made fun of people like Charles Darwin for admitting that they were stating tentative hypotheses, so I guess they couldn't win.

In the early 1920s, a nationwide anti-evolution campaign started with a more specific, achievable target than what had been seen before. They wanted bans, at the state-level, on public schools teaching evolution. In 1921 a rider was introduced in the South Carolina Senate's general appropriations bill that would ban Public schools from teaching what it called "the cult known as Darwinism". It passed the senate but was removed by a joint committee. The same year, in Kentucky, a Fundamentalist Baptist minister started a campaign for a similar bill in his own state, banning, in the words of one of the bills that the state legislature considered,

"Darwinism, atheism, agnosticism and evolution as it pertains to man."

Despite an aggressive campaign, including William Jennings Bryan addressing a joint session of the legislature, three anti-evolution bills failed to pass (as an interesting side note, the New York Times coverage of one of these bills mentions in passing an incident where an unnamed father was prosecuted for taking his children out of school because the school taught that earth was round. Apparently he managed to convince the court that "the sphericity of the earth was contrary to scripture". The article claims that "The case was dismissed, and so was the teacher". I can't say for sure, but this certainly sounds extremely made-up.)

The movement rapidly spread, with fundamentalist organisations across the country starting parallel campaigns for anti-evolution laws in their own states. In 1923, Oklahoma passed a law banning schools from adopting textbooks teaching Evolution. The same year a non-binding resolution from the Florida legislature declared that public schools teaching Human Evolution was "Improper and subversive to the best interest of the people".

And William Jennings Bryan wasn't alone. William Riley, a Minnesota Baptist minister and the founder of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, devoted his efforts to this campaign as well. Riley, much more than Bryan, associated evolution with atheistic left-wing politics, calling it "another Anarchistic socialist propaganda." Although, like Bryan, he blamed the theory of evolution for the German imperialism that had led to the First World War, and particularly for "the German conceit that "We are the superior race, and all the women of weaker nations are our natural prey, and the men of such nations our legitimate servants."" (Ironically, in the 1930s Riley would end up praising Hitler for taking on what he called an "International Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist Conspiracy.")

There was also the wildly popular and charismatic evangelist and former baseball player Billy Sunday, and the controversial radio preacher J. Frank Norris, known for his anti-Catholicism, his confrontations with local government, his support for the KKK, and rumours that he burned his own church down in 1912, and an assortment of other fundamentalist personalities.

And now Bryan and his allies began to focus on Tennessee and North Carolina as their principal targets. Bryan and Riley both toured these states, giving a series of speeches. Various of their fundamentalist allies went too, in the run-up to the 1924 elections, and in January 1925, Senator John Shelton and Representative John Butler both introduced, in their respective houses of the Tennessee state legislature, bills that would prohibit public school teachers from teaching evolution. Butler's bill beat Shelton's, and got through the House in just six days, with a huge 75 to 5 majority.

The bill passed the House too quickly for the media to really have time to pick up on it, but in the Senate it received more of a public airing, receiving comparisons to the persecution of Galileo and Giordano Bruno (including from at least one letter writer to the Nashville Banner who seems to have thought these two astronomers were persecuted for saying Earth was round). I particularly like a column in the Louisville Courier Journal, quoted in Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson, saying

"Perhaps if there is any other being entitled to share Mr. Bryan's satisfaction at this Tennessee Legislature it is the monkey. Surely if the human race is accurately represented by that portion of it in the Tennessee House of Representatives, the monkey has a right to rejoice that the human race is no kin to the monkey race."

Obviously modernist clergy objected too, but these were a small minority of Tennessee clergy. That said, a Methodist minister from Columbia gave a sermon where he accused the House of

"making monkeys of themselves at the rate of 71 to 5."

and claimed that

"the missing link… might be found near Capitol Hill."

Anti-evolutionists responded in kind. One of the main arguments was one we've seen from William Jennings Bryan. Most people oppose evolution, and they pay taxes for public schools, so the fair and democratic thing is for the majority to have a say in what gets taught in Public Schools. Others simply argued that teaching evolution should be stopped because it was impious and blasphemous and turned people into atheists.

Meanwhile in the senate, the senate judiciary committee rejected both Shelton and Butler's bills, on the basis that the state legislature shouldn't be making laws about religion. The bills were back with the senate.

And in Memphis, Billy Sunday was drawing absolutely colossal crowds to his speeches. Over his time in the city, he drew a total of around 200,000 spectators to his furious tirades, including one speech apparently particularly well-attended by members of the Ku Klux Klan (an organisation of which Billy Sunday very much approved), some of them in full regalia. Larson's description paints a picture not so much of eloquent rhetoric but of Sunday yelling incoherent and fragmentary abuse in the general direction of those who he called "that God forsaken gang of evolutionary cutthroats" (virtually none of whom were, presumably, present).

Back in Nashville, in the Capital, the senate sent the bills right back to the judiciary committee, and this time they gave in and agreed. It was back with the senate to debate and to vote.

The debate took place on March 13. There was an amendment proposed as a joke, that would, in addition to evolution, ban teachers from teaching that Earth is round. The speaker shut this down quickly, and then proceeded to deliver a speech on the dangers of teaching children "this stuff about man originating from some protoplasm or one-cell matter or lower form of life".

The debate in the senate pitted the majority, who supported the bill, mostly arguing that since most people in Tennessee don't believe in evolution and don't want their children learning about it in school, their children shouldn't be learning about it in public schools paid for by their taxes, against a minority whose principal strategy, rather than attempting to convince any of the majority of the truth of evolution, was arguing that the bill threatened freedom of thought and the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment. Whether or not you actually personally believe in evolution, it's not the Government's job to legislate on it.

After several hours of this, with Senators throwing around entirely invented estimates for the proportion of the Tennessee population who didn't believe in Evolution, and a crowd of spectators cheering and heckling from the galleries, the Senate approved the bill, voting 24 in favour to 6 against.

The next step was approval from the governor, Austin Peay. Evolutionists wrote to him to persuade him to use his veto power, anti-evolutionists wrote to him to persuade him not to use his veto power, but in the end, Peay signed off on the bill. On March 21, the bill passed into law as the Butler Act, and it was now punishable by a fine of between 100 and 500 Dollars

"for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

"After a careful examination, I can find nothing of consequence in the books now being taught in our schools with which this bill will interfere in the slightest manner. Therefore, it will not put our teachers in jeopardy. Probably the law will never be applied."

And that's where I'll leave it this time. You've been listening to Science: A Peculiar History. You can find the podcast almost anywhere you get podcasts, or at scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk. Remember to follow the podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky. The website also has episode transcripts, as well as images and sources for the earlier episodes. If you have any questions comments, corrections or suggestions, you can email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, message any of the social media channels, or use the contact form on the website.

Thank you for listening. Next time, I'll be talking about a plan to challenge the Butler Act.