Scopes Resources


The Enoch Pratt Library will have a display on the Scopes Trial as part of its Mencken Day 2015 celebration.

The Mencken Society’s newsletter featured “The Dope on Scopes”. The Trial did attract zanies and the unhinged but the typical faithful Daytonian was not a barely-human religious primitive. (Want to know more? Join the Mencken Society. Come visit us on Mencken Day, September 12, 2015 in Baltimore.)

We’ve posted a page of links to Scopes Trial Resources which includes, in the interest of fairness, links to criticisms of Mencken’s coverage of the Trial by an Anti-Evolutionist.

We provide here a quick link to Bryan’s closing statement to the jury which was not delivered because the defense chose not to deliver its closing statement and instead pleaded guilty so that the matter of the legality of the Butler Act could proceed to a higher court. It is certainly a mishmash of arguments, few which have any bearing on the validity of evolution. But let the reader decide.


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