Darrow shortly wrote to Mencken about the examination of Bryan, “I made up my mind to show the country what… — Edward Larson

By the 1940s, a fundamentalist subculture had formed in the United States, with a creationist scientific establishment of its own.

“I never yet found any conservative lawyer who, at the beginning, wanted to undertake a case which might reflect discredit on him. When it turns out differently and there seems to be some publicity or honor to be had, then offers of assistance come from all over the country.”

Stanford university president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionary 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!”