May 1926—THIS MONTH IN SCOPES TRIAL HISTORY
May 1926
Edward Young Clarke announces that his Supreme Kingdom’s campaign to drive evolution from the nation’s public schools will “turn America upside down.”
May 12, 1926
The Southern Baptist Convention unanimously “accepts Genesis as teaching that man was the special creation of God, and rejects every theory, evolution and other, which teaches that man originated in, or came out of, a lower animal ancestry.” The Convention claimed that the resolution would end “our present unrest and agitation over the Evolution question.”
May 31, 1926
The two-day hearing of Scopes’s appeal begins in the Tennessee Supreme Court in Nashville. The state cited Bryan’s majoritarianism, claiming that “public schools are created by the legislature, and the courts can in no manner control, limit, or proscribe the legislature in the exercise of power over them… The fact that a group of self-styled ’intellectuals’ who call themselves ‘scientists’ believe that a certain theory or thing is true does not to any degree prevent the state legislature… from forbidding the teaching or practicing of such a thing or theory which the legislature may conclude to be inimical… to the general public welfare.” In response, Darrow told the court that “we are once more fighting the old question, which after all is nothing but a question of the intellectual freedom of man.” Scopes, who was studying glacial geology for the Illinois Geological Survey, did not attend, telling a reporter that “I’m not interested in the outcome, and [want] to forget the entire episode.”
May 31, 1926
Evangelist T.T. Martin describes the University of Chicago—from which severalof the defense team’s expert witnesses came—as a “slaughterhouse of faith.”
