Latest news with #WilliamJenningsBryan
UPI
a day ago
- Politics
- UPI
On This Day, July 21: Monkey Trial ends with guilty verdict in Tennessee
1 of 3 | On July 21, 1925, the so-called Monkey Trial, which pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tenn., in one of the great confrontations in legal history, ended with John Thomas Scopes convicted and fined $100 for teaching evolution in violation of state law. UPI File Photo July 21 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1861, the first major military engagement of the Civil War occurred at Bull Run Creek, Va. In 1918, a German U-boat fired on the town of Orleans, Mass., on Cape Cod peninsula, damaging a tug boat and sinking four barges, and severely injuring one man. It was the only place in the United States to receive an enemy attack during World War I. In 1925, the so-called Monkey Trial, which pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tenn., in one of the great confrontations in legal history, ended with John Thomas Scopes convicted and fined $100 for teaching evolution in violation of state law. In 1969, U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, lifted off from the moon in the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle and docked with the command module Columbia piloted by Michael Collins. In 1970, after 11 years of construction, the massive Aswan High Dam across the Nile River in Egypt was completed, ending the cycle of flood and drought in the Nile River region but triggering an environmental controversy. In 2000, a report from special counsel John Danforth cleared U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and the government of wrongdoing in the April 19, 1993, fire that ended the Branch Davidian siege near Waco, Texas. File Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI In 2007, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the best-selling series, sold more than 8.3 million copies on its first day in bookstores. In 2011, Greece continued efforts to climb out of a financial chasm with a second bailout pledge from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund worth $157 billion. Earlier, the nation dealt with its debt crisis with the help of a $146 billion loan package. In 2024, President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid in the 2024 presidential race, formally endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris. Former President Donald Trump defeated Harris in November 2024 to win his second term in office. File Photo by Melina Mara/UPI
National Post
11-07-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Colby Cosh: How evolution won the creationist culture war
Article content We've lost awareness of how weird this was. If the Monkey Trial had never taken place, and an expert historian were asked in 2025 to name the two greatest American orators of the period, 'Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan' might still be the answer you would get. Nothing of this kind had ever happened before, nor has it happened since: an actual criminal jury trial with honest-to-God mega-celebrities acting as counsel on both sides. Article content The trial was, we now know, a thoroughly contrived occasion for 'culture war' cooked up by the ACLU and some of its friends in the American liberal establishment. In 2025 we are more than familiar with such things: anybody who has internet access would understand, would say without pausing for a second thought, that William Jennings Bryan was being 'trolled.' But when the trial began it seemed that the trolling effort was bound to fail. Article content The judge, John T. Raulston, accepted some written evidence on the scientific evidence for evolution, but refused to allow experts to be cross-examined in court, and tried to stick to the actual issue in the case: had defendant Scopes broken the law of Tennessee? With the defence left hanging, Darrow asked if Bryan would be willing to face questioning as an expert on the text and teaching of the Bible. Bryan, who was as eager as Darrow to add some theatrical colour to the proceedings, unwisely agreed. Article content The result was a confrontation that has become immortal, mostly through the avenue of the oft-adapted play Inherit the Wind. (The Darrow-versus-Bryan parts of the play are quite faithful to the trial transcript. These gentlemen didn't need help creating drama.) Darrow, who is perhaps still the archetypal American unbeliever, asked village-atheist questions about the accuracy and consistency of the Bible. Bryan became flustered, indignant and abusive, and did much more poorly in handling Darrow's questions than any decently educated fundamentalist would now. Article content When the dust settled, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. His conviction was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the Butler Act; however, the amount of Scopes's fine was technically contrary to the state's constitution, and the appeal judge, observing that Scopes had long since moved on from Tennessee, urged against a re-trial. Article content I have written about the Scopes trial a time or two, and I am a little sad to say that it appears to be losing its hold on the popular imagination. Partly this is because the famous people involved are no longer famous. But the culture war has also moved on from the topic of biological evolution to a surprising degree, hasn't it? When I was a young man, and the year 2000 still lurked in the future, there was a brief vogue among religious folk for varieties of 'scientific creationism' that might somehow locate the hand of God in the story of humanity. In retrospect, 'scientific creationism' seems like a fatal compromise, and little is heard of it in the era of cheap DNA sequencing. You might object to the possibility that you had distant Neanderthal ancestors, but, if you care to, you can pay someone a few hundred bucks to find out the exact quantum of Neanderthal DNA in your cells. Article content In other words, almost everyone has accepted the premises that the Butler Act was specifically designed to condemn: man did 'descend' from 'lower' beasts, from primates, and if God intended for there to exist a creature in His own image, evolution seems to be how He went about it. Bryan and the Tennessee legislature believed that the Bible was literally true, and that its divine status and meaning would be annihilated by conceding any presence of mere allegory or metaphor or instructive invention. Article content Even today's evangelical fundamentalists aren't usually that fundamentalist. Indeed, in 1925 Bryan himself proved shaky on the witness stand, conceding that the six-day Creation might not have involved 144 actual hours of clock time. I daresay, even speaking as an atheist, that it seems a touch insulting to the Bible to regard it as a brute factual record or as some sort of unartful consumer-product manual. Article content
UPI
10-07-2025
- Business
- UPI
On This Day, July 10: Scopes 'Monkey Trial' begins in Tennessee
1 of 8 | Photograph shows William Jennings Bryan (seated, left, with fan) and Clarence Darrow (standing, center, with arms folded) at an outdoor courtroom during the Scopes Trial (Tennessee v. Scopes) in Dayton, Tenn., in July 1925. UPI File Photo July 10 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1925, the so-called Monkey Trial, in which John Scopes was accused of teaching evolution in school, a violation of state law, began in Dayton, Tenn., featuring a classic confrontation between William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist hero, and legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow. In 1962, the United States launched the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar, into orbit, which relayed TV pictures between the United States and Europe. In 1985, Coca-Cola, besieged by consumers dissatisfied with the new Coke introduced in April, dusted off the old formula and dubbed it "Coca-Cola Classic." File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI In 1989, Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and countless other Warner Bros. cartoon characters and radio and TV comic creations, died from complications of heart disease. He was 81. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin was inaugurated as the first freely elected president of the Russian republic. In 1992, former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was sentenced to 40 years in prison for cocaine racketeering. In 2009, General Motors completed its race through bankruptcy with the signing of a contract with the U.S. government, which got 61 percent of the company. The recovery plan included considerable shrinkage, including the closing of factories and layoffs of 21,000 union workers. Then-General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson attends a press conference in New York City on June 1, 2009. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI In 2011, media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, Britain's best-selling weekly newspaper, abruptly ceased publication amid allegations that its reporters and investigators had hacked into telephones of royalty, politicians, celebrities, homicide victims, families of fallen soldiers and others to illegally gain material for stories. In 2012, an Israeli court acquitted former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of corruption but found him guilty of breach of trust. The charges stemmed from a period before he was PM. In 2018, divers rescued the last of the 12 boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in Thailand, where they'd been trapped for more than two weeks. In 2022, Serbian Novak Djokovic defeated Australian Nick Kyrgios to win his fourth-straight and record-tying seventh Wimbledon men's singles title. File Photo by Hugo Philpott/UPI
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
This ‘Trial of the Century' Is 100. Its Lessons Could Save the Democrats.
In July 1925, John Scopes faced a jury in a stifling courtroom in Dayton, Tenn. A 24-year-old teacher, Scopes stood accused of violating the Butler Act, a recently enacted state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution because it contradicted the Bible. He was convicted, fined $100 and basked in the renown of the case for the rest of his life. Despite its rather genial outcome (the Tennessee Supreme Court even overturned Mr. Scopes's conviction on a technicality), echoes from the 'trial of the century' still resound in American culture and politics a full century later. The Scopes trial was a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity, represented by two of the most famous attorneys in the country: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense. Broadcast on the radio, it exposed the horror many urban liberals felt toward people they deemed dogmatic and uneducated. H.L. Mencken, the eloquent if arrogant critic of unrefined America, attended the trial and hissed to his many readers that Bryan was 'deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning' — 'a peasant come home to the barnyard.' A hundred years on, many voters in rural areas still feel that the cosmopolitan politicians and advisers who run the Democratic Party look down on them. Because those voters have an outsize influence on the makeup of the Senate, Democrats will have to reckon with that perception, accurate or not, if they hope to dominate American politics again. While teaching evolution has been legal in every state for decades, the larger antagonisms revealed by the Scopes trial persist. Americans in rural areas are more likely to identify as Christian than their urban counterparts. Those who are white overwhelmingly back politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who says he takes his 'worldview' from the Bible, and President Trump, who claims he was 'saved by God to make America great again.' Americans with a strong rural identity are also more likely to bear a grudge against experts and intellectuals, heirs of the evolutionists who came to Scopes's defense. Who should decide what schools teach remains as intensely disputed as a century ago. Bryan believed that 'the people,' not teachers, had 'the right to control the educational system which they have created and which they tax themselves to support.' If they wanted to ban the teaching of evolution with a bill like the Butler Act, they should be able to. A similar logic drives the contemporary crusade by Moms for Liberty and other right-wing groups to ban courses infected by D.E.I. and to toss books about L.G.B.T.Q. people out of school libraries. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's compendium of conservative ideas, called for parents to decide what students would learn. It even favored publicly funding private schools, including religious schools, that could teach children to doubt the existence of climate change, the persistence of racism and, yes, the theory of evolution. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Political Theater Makes Bad Drama
Tennessee schoolteacher John Thomas Scopes was put on trial starting July 10, 1925, for violating the state's Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach evolution in any state-funded school. While 100 years ago Tennessee sought to prevent teachers from denying the biblical account of humankind's origin, the modern approach to education practically requires them to do so. American schools regularly teach material that many Americans deem blasphemous and heretical. The question then, as now, isn't whether religion and reason are compatible. Rather, it's who should decide what publicly funded schools are allowed to teach. The simple answer to the debate is to bypass the debate altogether, and endorse the logical and just right of parents to exercise school choice, as the sole educational practice not liable to coercion. Scopes, like Rosa Parks three decades later, volunteered to stand as the defendant in a case designed to test the law. He was found guilty and fined, although the fine was subsequently rescinded and Tennessee repealed the Butler Act in 1967. His lawyer was Clarence Darrow, paid for by the American Civil Liberties Union. The state was represented by William Jennings Bryan, the former presidential candidate and U.S. secretary of state. The Scopes trial was fictionalized and memorialized by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee in their 1955 play, 'Inherit the Wind.' In the 1960 film version, Darrow, the most famous American attorney of his day, is portrayed by Spencer Tracy in the greatest performance of his stunning career. Both play and film were intended as ripostes to the House Un-American Activities Committee's persecution of those accused of communist sympathies.
