Origins
State Representative John W. Butler, head of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association, lobbied state legislatures to pass anti-evolution laws, succeeding in Tennessee when the Butler Act was passed. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union financed a test case in which John Scopes, a Tennessee high school science teacher, agreed to be tried for violating the Act. Scopes, who had substituted for the regular biology teacher, was charged on May 5, 1925, with teaching evolution from a chapter in Civic Biology, a textbook by George William Hunter, that described the theory of evolution. The two sides brought in the biggest names in the nation, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, and the trial was followed on radio transmissions throughout America.
Read more about this topic: Scopes Trial
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
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