These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

But Darrow knew that, for all that Bryan’s campaign against the teaching of evolution was a campaign against social Darwinism, and a campaign for the underdog, it was also an assault on science. And Darrow couldn’t take that, nor could most people who’d fought on the same side of the labor question as Bryan. By 1924, Eugene Debs, a longtime Bryan supporter, had taken to referring to Bryan as “this shallow-minded mouther of empty phrases, this pious canting mountebank, this prophet of the stone age.”147 Darrow agreed. He had been raised reading Charles Darwin and Frederick Douglass. His interest was in education. “I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism,” he said. He considered Bryan “the idol of all Morondom.”