1/8: Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation Hardcover – August 13, 2024 by Brenda Wineapple (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Faith-Democracy-Riveted-Nation/dp/0593229924/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.JDRqUc36UiUIH3eK1_Pqbjxg6Sx8dBlH9BsLvmHdHafp_9Muk2_yEUhSCVX__F0MdOA4DhC69ktDYCzLlsPHGTcm-frb_k2Hnexz13sMaJxDWfyq4IUe0ILOyiUrFYPU_NYz6u09C36A1AtGqgDqw-0-ZLbsGdLDtipkKF2KSkk07atZvK0AX5heVgt9YYHDgNjftDlcWA5itjSpDZyEvB8zB6lDdr4CX5yJWAy-aRc.53SKRbwc3rF4M4p-RAjIj8VWAu0wIY5LjLXsK3oVBwM&qid=1730836318&sr=1-1
The dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial, which captivated the nation and exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy
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“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.” So said legendary attorney Clarence Darrow as hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes, who was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution to his biology class in a public school.
Brenda Wineapple, the award-winning author of The Impeachers,explores how and why the Scopes trial quickly seemed a circus-like media sensation, drawing massive crowds and worldwide attention. Darrow, a brilliant and controversial lawyer, said in his electrifying defense of Scopes that people should be free to think, worship, and learn. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president, argued for the prosecution that evolution undermined the fundamental, literal truth of the Bible and created a society without morals, meaning, and hope.
In Keeping the Faith, Wineapple takes us into the early years of the twentieth century—years of racism, intolerance, and world war—to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history. At its heart, the Scopes trial dramatized conflicts over many of the fundamental values that define America, and that continue to divide Americans today.
1925 Scopes "Monket Trial"
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor. Keeping the Faith, God, Democracy, and the |
| 0:15.2 | trial that riveted a nation, a news story and book by Brenda Wineapple, telling us the Scopes trial of 1925. It is dramatic. It is |
| 0:26.7 | sensationally important for the understanding of the culture in the 1920s. It is 100 years later, |
| 0:33.0 | and it is still debatable. Brenda, congratulations. A very good evening. |
| 0:38.2 | I take you to Robinson's Drugstore. |
| 0:41.1 | It is early May, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee. |
| 0:45.6 | There's a meeting there over glass top tables. |
| 0:48.3 | You give us these wonderful details, Brenda. |
| 0:50.9 | They're drinking Coca-Cola with cherry flavor, |
| 1:00.4 | and they're discussing a law recently passed in January, in the legislature in Tennessee, |
| 1:05.2 | and then again in March by the Senate in Tennessee becoming a law. |
| 1:10.6 | And that law is at the center of what, at the is joked to be the monkey trials. |
| 1:12.3 | What is that law? |
| 1:15.3 | Why is it brought forward by a man named Butler? |
| 1:16.4 | Good day to you, Brenda. |
| 1:18.2 | Oh, good day. |
| 1:20.1 | Nice to be with you. |
| 1:21.6 | Thank you so much. |
| 1:27.5 | Yes, 1925, 100 years ago, and it feels like yesterday in some ways. |
| 1:34.8 | And as you mentioned, Tennessee legislature passed something that was familiarly known as the Butler Act because John Washington Butler had proposed it. |
| 1:39.0 | And what it was, simply put, was a ban on the teaching of evolution in public schools because the theory of |
| 1:48.3 | evolution, even though it had been around for a long time, was presumed to deny the story |
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