William Jennings Bryan

Bryan was a national figure for thirty years before Dayton. He took the Democratic nomination in 1896 at thirty six on the strength of a single speech against the gold standard, ran three times and lost three times, served as Secretary of State, and resigned in 1915 rather than sign a note to Germany he thought would bring the country into the war. He campaigned for prohibition, for the direct election of senators, for a federal income tax and for women's suffrage, and he was the most effective popular orator in American public life.

His campaign against the teaching of evolution belongs to the last five years of that career, and his own stated reasons are more specific than the caricature. He had read the war literature arguing that German militarism drew on a struggle-for-existence ethic, and he had read the American eugenics movement, which by the 1920s was in the biology textbooks he objected to, including the one used in Dayton, which classified humans into races and recommended preventing the unfit from reproducing. He treated evolution as the scientific warrant for a politics he had spent his life opposing.

His second argument was procedural and democratic. Parents and taxpayers, he held, are entitled to decide what is taught in schools they pay for, and a teacher paid from public funds is not free to teach against their wishes. He was not, on the record, a young earth creationist; under examination at Dayton he allowed that the days of creation might have been long periods.

The trial was arranged. The American Civil Liberties Union advertised for a Tennessee teacher willing to test the new statute forbidding the teaching that man descended from a lower order of animals, and a group of Dayton businessmen recruited John Scopes, a young science teacher and football coach, partly to put the town on the map. Scopes was not certain he had ever taught the material. Bryan volunteered for the prosecution; Darrow volunteered for the defence.

The judge excluded the expert scientific testimony the defence had assembled, which removed its case. On the seventh day, with the court moved outdoors because of the heat and the crowd, Darrow called Bryan himself as an expert witness on the Bible, and Bryan agreed to take the stand. The examination that followed is the reason the trial is remembered: questions about Jonah, about Joshua and the sun, about the age of the earth, and Bryan's concession that the days of Genesis might not have been of twenty four hours, which brought objections from his own side. The exchange was expunged from the record the next day and the case went to the jury, which convicted in nine minutes. The fine was a hundred dollars and was set aside on appeal on a technicality, so the statute was never tested.

Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton five days later. He had prepared a closing argument he never delivered and had it published. The play Inherit the Wind, written in 1955, uses the trial as an allegory about McCarthyism, changes the names and much of the substance, and is not a record of what happened; a great deal of what people believe about Dayton comes from it.