What is the purpose of this examination?" Darrow answered honestly. "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the ed… - Edward J. Larson

The state law against teaching evolution and the resulting trial of John Scopes did not settle the matter in Tennessee or anywhere else. America’s adversarial legal system tends to drive parties apart rather than reconcile them, which certainly happened in this case.

Darrow shortly wrote to Mencken about the examination of Bryan, “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”

Stanford university president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionarily biologist who later volunteered to aid in the legal defense of John Scopes, spoke for many academics when he dismissed traditional Protestant revivalism as “simply a form of drunkenness no more worthy of respect than the drunkenness that lies in the gutter!”