The Most Famous Trial In The 1920's

The 1920’s was one of the most controversial time periods in all of American history.
With many advances in science came new theories such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. With the theory of evolution being incorporated in schools many religious families became severely distressed. Court cases began popping up all over the nation in both favor and opposition towards the new teaching of how life on earth began. The most famous trial being the Scopes trial, which effected the education system afterwards due to its intense trail known as Darrow vs Bryan and even the odd conversation that sparked the whole fight. On March 24 1923, Oklahoma Governor John Walton signed the first antievolution law. The law offered free textbooks to public
Chief Prosecutor Tom Stewart then asked seven students in Scope's class questions about his teachings. They testified that Scopes told them that man and all other mammals had evolved from one-celled organism (Benen). On Thursday, July 16, the defense called its first witness, Dr. Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from the Johns Hopkins University. Bryans motives was to allow everyone to hear Metalfs testimony of evolution, in which afterwards Bryan used Metalfs speech against him unquestionably "complaining that the evolutionists had man descending "not even from American monkeys, but Old World monkeys”(Streissguth 162). On the seventh day of trial, Raulston asked the defense if it had any more evidence. What followed was what the New York Times described as "the most amazing court scene on Anglo-Saxon history." Hays asked that William Jennings Bryan be called to the stand as an expert on the Bible (Moore 1). Darrow began his interrogation of Bryan with a quiet question: "You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?" Bryan replied, "Yes, I have. I have studied the Bible for about fifty years." This began a series of questions designed to undermine a literalist interpretation of the Bible. Bryan was asked about a whale swallowing Jonah, Joshua making the sun stand still, Noah and the great flood, the temptation of Adam in the Garden of Eden, and the creation according to Genesis. After countering that "everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there," Bryan finally conceded that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. In response to Darrow's relentless questions as to whether the six days of creation, as described in Genesis, were twenty-four hour days, Bryan said "My impression is that they were periods"(Benen). Darrow used this attack to make Bryan seem uneducated, which