William Jennings Bryan: Speech at the Scopes Trial

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Historians have not been altogether sympathetic with Bryan's late career. Although most admit that Bryan was an important contributor to national politics at the turn of the century, they are less impressed with his work after he left active politics in 1915. Increasingly out of touch with mainstream issues, Bryan appeared to take more interest in conservative evangelical causes like Prohibition and creationism. In fact, in many ways he seemed to be a self-appointed lay minister who tried to hold the line against godless modernism in the name of evangelical Protestantism. While there is some evidence to support this interpretation, it should be pointed out that it was in this period that Bryan also championed women's suffrage and even a primitive form of gender equality. He continued to support government regulation of railroads, and he embraced publicly financed political campaigns and opposed the death penalty, issues that some thought brought him close to political radicalism. But he was best known at the end of his life for his opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial of John T. Scopes in 1925 for violating a newly enacted Tennessee law that made it illegal to teach evolution gave Bryan an opportunity to articulate his own ideas about creationism.

Bryan was indeed in the twilight of his influence by 1925. His health was failing (he suffered from advanced diabetes), and he had not practiced law in almost three decades. The trial itself was a publicity stunt that local businessmen hoped would put their town of Dayton, Tennessee, on the map. A local coach and substitute teacher, John T. Scopes, agreed to be the defendant in a trial that would test the legality of a Tennessee statute that made it a crime to teach evolution in the public schools. The Dayton boosters succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Reporters descended on the hamlet in droves, and at least part of the trial was broadcast on the radio. Bryan's role in the proceedings was that of an orator rather than a prosecutor. He called no witnesses, nor did he cross-examine any. He planned to give two speeches to the court, one on the fifth day and a summation on the last day of the trial. Bryan gave only the first, although he hoped to polish the second for public distribution. He died in Dayton two days after the trial, while in the midst of revising his second speech. His other appearance in the Dayton courtroom was as a witness on the infallibility of the Bible in a famous and sometimes embarrassing exchange with the skillful and notorious defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

Bryan's hope was that these remarks to the judge and jury—though clearly he had in mind a much larger audience—would win the battle for public opinion. Ironically, there was no need to convince the jury, because both defense and prosecution agreed that Scopes was guilty of violating Tennessee's 1925 anti-evolution law by teaching Darwinian theory in his biology class. Bryan had plenty of admirers in the audience and even more in Dayton and beyond, but his courtroom opponents—including Clarence Darrow—were among the most formidable that he had ever faced.

Bryan begins his summation by admitting that he has so far been silent in the courtroom. He points out that he is moved in this instance to speak because “the question involved is not confined to local questions, but is the broadest that will possibly arise.” For this reason, he says, “I have felt justified in submitting my views on the case for the consideration of the court.” For Bryan, the notion that outsiders could tamper with local decisions is at odds with both democratic practice and theory. The minority, he concludes, should not override the will of the majority. In his younger days, Bryan had attacked the distant and usually urban economic experts who had argued for high tariffs and the gold standard against the common people of the hinterlands, and here in the Scopes trial he calls on the same kind of language: “We do not need any experts in science,” he roars. “Every member of the jury is as good an expert on the Bible.” Bryan even introduced Scopes's biology textbook into evidence as proof that the experts were not in touch with the reality of local affairs or even with common sense. Evolution, he kept reminding the court, was no more than a theory expounded by those hell-bent on weaning the culture away from Christian principles.

Bryan was perilously close to engaging in pure demagoguery in his assault on outside experts, especially since he was one himself. It was a rhetorical tactic that had worked for him many times before, and his remarks were interrupted with a fair number voicing “Amen.” His conclusion that taxpayers ought to be allowed to control what is taught in the schools they helped finance met with great applause. What is substantively different in his oratory at the Scopes trial, however, is his defense of a literal reading of the Bible as revealed truth and his contention that evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christianity, a position that could have made more moderate Protestants uneasy. Doubtless many agreed with Bryan on this point, but it left him open to the argument that not every Christian embraced a literal interpretation of the Bible, an issue that the prosecution exploited in its rebuttal.

Largely because of this kind of rhetoric, many see Bryan's last years as verging on bigotry and intolerance. By the time of this speech, of course, Bryan had been giving talks for several days in Dayton, some of them in local churches where the trial jurors and even the judge were sometimes in attendance. In short, he had already prepared his courtroom audience for much of what he had to say on the record; his hope was to influence a much larger audience through media coverage of the proceedings. The most dramatic moments were not all his, however. The defense's response to this speech—given by a former Bryan staffer at the State Department—was probably the most brilliant oration of the trial and was also greeted with great applause, perhaps even greater than that given to Bryan. Then, too, there was Clarence Darrow's devastating examination, which exposed the shallowness of Bryan's literalist Christian views and did as much as anything to discredit his fundamentalism.