American History Too!

In the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, the morning of Friday July 10, 1925 was blisteringly hot. Outside the country courtroom, a crowd of around 1000 people had gathered. Squeezing through the throng came a young schoolteacher and athletics coach, John Scopes. Scopes was accompanied by Clarence Darrow, one of the most famous lawyers in the United States. But when a cheer went up from the assembled mass, it was not for Scopes or Darrow, but for the elderly, burly figure of Williams Jennings Bryan. Lawyer, moralist, three times Presidential candidate, religious authority, and key figure in the Populist movement of the 1890s. These two legal titans were here to defend and prosecute John Scopes. His crime was admitting to teaching Darwinian evolution in defiance of a state law banning the promulgation of evolutionary theory.  The Scopes Trial has entered popular myth and legend, claimed as a victory by both sides, misrepresented and misunderstood in film and literature. So, in Episode 17 of American History To