Scopes Trial Quotes
Dayton was the location of the infamous scope’s trial where a high school teacher was criminally convicted for teaching about evolution in his science class.
The trial convicted a teacher, Scopes, of the “crime” of teaching the theory of evolution in a school.
A teacher had been arrested and threatened with jail because he had taught Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a high school science class. The ACLU paid for famed attorney, Clarence Darrow, to defend Scopes in the famous trial that exposed the ignorance and bias of the schools that prohibited teaching about evolution as it contravened the Protestant fundamentalist Biblical version of the creation of humans. While the ACLU had a major victory, even today many school systems—mostly in the South—still prohibit such teaching and while no teacher can be jailed, they can be fired for not following the curriculum of the local school board.
In the Democratic national convention of 1912, Clark had obtained a majority of the delegate votes and was well on his way to the two thirds necessary for the Presidential nomination. William Jennings Bryan, a close personal friend of Clark's, headed the Nebraska delegation which had already instructed Bryan to vote for Clark. However, in a dramatic repudiation of his old friend, Bryan switched to Woodrow Wilson and turned the tide against Clark, who characterized Bryan as:
