Document B: Malone’s Trial Speech (Modified)

Document B: Malone’s Trial Speech (Modified)

The least that this generation can do, your Honor, is to give the next generation

all the facts and theories that observation and learning have produced—give it to

the children in the hope of heaven that they will make a better world than we

have. We have just had a war with 20 million dead. Civilization is not so proud of

the work of the adults.

For God’s sake let the children have their minds kept open—close no doors to

their knowledge. Make the distinction between religion and science. Let them

have both. Let them both be taught. Let them both live.
We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we

stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with freedom in America. We are not

afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it! Where is the fear? We defy it!

(Loud applause. Bailiff raps for order)
Source: Excerpt from Dudley Field Malone’s speech on the fourth day of the

Scopes trial, July 15, 1925. Dayton, Tennessee. Dudley Field Malone was a New

York attorney who was on the defense team, defending John Scopes. He argued

for the importance of teaching science.

Document C: Reverend Straton Article (Modified)

The real issue at Dayton and everywhere today is this: “Whether the religion of

the Bible shall be ruled out of the schools, while the religion of evolution, with its

harmful results, shall be ruled into the schools by law.”

John Scopes’s lawyers left New York and Chicago, where real religion is ignored,

where crime is most widespread, and they came to Tennessee to save a

community where women are still honored, where men are still polite, where laws

are still respected, where home life is still sweet, where the marriage vow is still

sacred. Think of the nerve of it! and the enormous vanity of it!
Source: Excerpt from Reverend John Roach Straton’s article in American

Fundamentalist, “The Most Sinister Movement in the United States.” December

26, 1925. John Roach Straton was a minister who preached across the country

against the sins of modern life. He was firmly opposed to the teaching of

evolution.


Document D: New York Times Article (Modified)

Cranks and Freaks Flock to Dayton:

Strange Theories are Preached and Sung
Visitors to Scopes Trial are Mostly Tennessean Mountaineers.

Tennessee came to Dayton today in overalls to attend the trial of John Scopes

for the teaching of evolution. The Tennesseans came from mountain farms near

Dayton, where work, usually begun at day light, had been deserted so that gaunt,

tanned, toil-worn men and women and shy children might see William Jennings

Bryan’s “duel to the death” with “enemies of the Bible.”

They stood in groups under the trees, listening to evangelists, moved by the

occasion to speak for the “Word.” They listened to blind minstrels, who sang

mountain hymns and promises of reward for the faithful, and to a string quartet of

negroes. They walked up and down hot, dusty Market Street, with its buildings

hung with banners, and lined with soda-water, sandwich, and book stalls, as for a

carnival. Religion and business had become strangely mixed.

Vocabulary

Cranks: oddballs

minstrels: white entertainers who wore black makeup and performed in variety shows
Source: Excerpt from a front page New York Times article, “Cranks and Freaks

Flock to Dayton.” July 11, 1925. The New York Times editorials sided with the

defense and criticized Dayton’s small-town mentality. Dayton’s population in

1925 was 1,800.