How Successful Was The Monkey Trial In The 1920's

Changes The Scopes trial or “monkey trial” took place on July 10, 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. Where John Thomas Scopes was being tried for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a public school. Tennessee was the first state to pass an anti-evolution law which prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools and universities. The trial was not just about science versus religion, it was much more complex. The trial represented the differing ideas and beliefs from people that were from different parts of the country, and how Americans were also divided among old and new ideas brought on by the new technological innovations of the 1920’s.

The monkey trial was a scheme that was set up by George Rappalyea, R.E. Robinson,

When people started to migrate to bigger cities, their old beliefs and ideas started to change with the help of advertisements, movies, and radio. Which began “A protracted struggle erupted over America’s cultural soul that often pitted urban dwellers against country folks, college-educated sophisticates against believers in old-time religion, white Protestants against ethnic and racial minorities” Parrish (110). This is evident when H.L. Mencken a journalist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper who coined the phrase “monkey trial” often wrote negatively about the south and how he outraged the people of Dayton by calling them “primates, morons, and hillbilly’s”. Mencken also described the south as an “intellectual dessert” for not believing in Darwin’s theory of evolution. On the other hand Bryan and other people from the bible belt states saw dangers in the teachings of Darwin’s theory. In the court hearing Bryan brought up a case were Darrow was the defense attorney for two young wealthy educated young men from Chicago Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who murdered fourteen year-old Bobby Frank. Darrow was able to convince the jury in that case not to convict both Leopold and Loeb to the death penalty due to outside influences such as evolution and the influence of Nietzsche’s inelastic ideas that they read while in college. The case of Leopold and Loeb was seen by critics in the nation as “the moral wasteland created by families with too much money, young men with too much education and not enough simple morality grounded in religion” Parrish