Scopes Monkey Trial Quotes

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair. [Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

A local historian later ventured that the Osage murder trials received more media coverage than the previous year’s Scopes “monkey trial,” in Tennessee, regarding the legality of teaching evolution in a state-funded school.

Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of nature.

The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don't realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn't overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

The same year as the Scopes Monkey Trial, the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism was founded.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin. For the Klan, that meant there was “no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,” as the Defender, a Black newspaper in Chicago, put it. A part-time science teacher and high school football coach, John T. Scopes, challenged the new law. William Jennings Bryan, the aging populist and former Democratic presidential nominee, was enlisted to take up the creationist cause in what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Bryan withered in the summer heat of the outdoor courtroom in 1925, and melted under questioning about biblical literalism from his opponent, Clarence Darrow. The trial ended with a $100 fine of the high school science teacher. Bryan died five days later.

The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as 'the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.' In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms. The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile.

The textbook in question in the infamous Scope's Monkey Trial was partially written by the Harvard educated white supremacist, Charles B. Davenport.

Habermas writes: “The ideals of freedom . . . of conscience, human rights and democracy [are] the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. . . . To this day there is no alternative to it.”17 None of this denies that science and reason are sources of enormous and irreplaceable good for human society. The point is rather that science alone cannot serve as a guide for human society.18 This was well summarized in a speech that was written for but never delivered at the Scopes “monkey trial”: “Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. . . . Science does not [and cannot] teach brotherly love.”19 Secular, scientific reason is a great good, but if taken as the sole basis for human life, it will be discovered that there are too many things we need that it is missing.

contumacious

Paul McCartney’s solo career, Willie Mays’ last season with the New York Mets, Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial, John Ashbery’s Flowchart, Georgia O’Keeffe’s last 10 years of paintings, T.S. Eliot’s plays, & John Glenn’s last flight as an astronaut. The Beatles’ Long and Winding Road, Jim Brown’s last season, Keats’ Odes, Mozart’s concertos, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Wilfred Owen’s lyrics, & Marie Curie in her laboratory. The former set we recall- if at all- because all of the folk were past their prime- way past. Almost embarrassing were their quests &/or achievements. The latter we recall- & will most likely always do so with fondness & fervor- because they left their respective quests at the height of their powers. It’s how we all hope to be recalled. When we think of an afterlife we always envision ourselves at the prime of our life. Who would want to inhabit a realm filled with yipping old yentas & crusty altacockers? It’s one of the oldest stereotypes there is about the creationary impulse: The fires of youth. One of the great sources of woe for a lot of artists is that just as they get enough time & experience under their belts to gain technical skill in their field, the impulse to do so wanes. There seems to be a brief nexus where the 2- skill & desire- meet & are sustaining. Too young & a lot of crap- with potential- is produced. Too old & little work is made- & what is is skilled but dull, repetitive, & uninteresting. Thus most artists, &/or scientists, have similar careers which graphed would form a nice slowly rising & falling horizontal arc whose rounded apex is between the years 35 & 50. But is it necessarily so? There are examples of such who defy the conventional wisdom in poetry. The 2 best examples in the English language are Wallace Stevens & William Butler Yeats- in fact their poetry probably kept improving with age. But for every Stevens & Yeats there’s the last 20 years of Whitman’s bloated poetry & terrible prose, Hardy’s verse, Pound’s Cantos, Ginsberg’s last 30 years, Ashbery, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, Quincy Troupe, & on & on.