I'm John Batchler. Keeping the faith, God, Democracy, and the trial that riveted a nation.

A new story and book by Brenda Wineapple, telling us the Scopes trial of 1925. It is dramatic.

It is sensationally important for the understanding of the culture in the 1920s. It is 100

years later, and it is still debatable.

Brenda, congratulations.

A very good evening.

I take you to Robinson's Drugstore.

It is early May, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee.

There's a meeting there over glass top tables.

You give us these wonderful details, Brenda.

They're drinking Coca-Cola with cherry flavor.

And they're discussing a law recently passed in January in the legislature in Tennessee.

And then again in March by the Senate in Tennessee becoming a law.

And that law is at the center of what at the time is

joked to be the monkey trials. What is that law? Why is it brought forward by a man named Butler?

Good day to you, Brenda. Good day. Nice to be with you. Thank you so much. Yes, 1925, 100 years ago, and it feels like yesterday in some ways.

And as you mentioned, Tennessee legislature passed something that was familiarly known as the Butler Act,

because John Washington Butler had proposed it. And what it was, simply put, was a ban on the teaching of evolution in public schools

because the theory of evolution, even though it had been around for a long time, was presumed to deny the story of divine creation as told in the Bible, and instead taught that we're descended from a lower

order of animals. And that was the Butler law, and that's what the Butler Act. And that's why

the group that you mentioned, Dayton, Tennessee, Robinson's drugstore, had gathered together.

Yes, and it's important. All these personalities contribute to what will be a drama in July,

...