 This battle between evolutionists and ‘Fundamentalists’ came to a head in the mid 1920s in Dayton Tennessee, when a young school teacher John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in class, in defiance of a state law prohibiting such teaching. Prosecuted by three-times presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and defended by noted agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow, the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ caught the attention of the world, especially thanks to the inflammatory reporting of Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken. Matters descended to the farcical when, denied the opportunity to introduce his own science witnesses, Darrow put on the stand the prosecutor Bryan. In the end, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. This conviction was overturned on a technicality on appeal, but there were no more prosecutions, even though the Tennessee law remained on the books for another forty years. In the 1950s, the Scopes trial became the basis of a famous play and then movie, Inherit the Wind. This portrays the Bryan figure as a bigot, wedded to a crude picture of life’s past. In fact, Bryan in respects was an odd figure to be defending the Tennessee law. He thought that the days of Creation are long periods of time, and he had little sympathy for eschatological speculations about Armageddon and so forth. It is quite possible that, humans apart, he accepted some form of evolution. His objections to Darwinism were more social than theological. He hated what he thought were the militaristic implications that many drew from the struggle for existence at the center of Darwin’s thinking. The First World War, with many justifying violence in the name of evolutionary biology, confirmed his suspicions. (The Pulitzer Prize winning, Summer of the Gods, Larson 1997, is definitive on the Scopes trial. It is generally agreed that Inherit the Wind is using history as a vehicle to explore and condemn McCarthy-like attacks on uncomfortably new or dissenting-type figures in American society.)