“I never yet found any conservative lawyer who, at the beginning, wanted to undertake a case which might… — Edward Larson

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

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!”

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.”