Throughout William Jennings Bryan’s long political career, his fame rested on his oratorical skills and his championing of rural America. Both of these characteristics were on display in Tennessee. The following selection is from one of Bryan’s many long speeches during the trial. In it, he focuses on the religious and political rights of Tennesseans and also pokes fun at the evolutionary link between humans and monkeys.

No, not the Bible, you see in this state they cannot teach the Bible.¹ They can only teach things that declare it to be a lie, according to the learned counsel. These people in the state—Christian people—have tied their hands by their Constitution. They say we all believe in the Bible for it is the overwhelming belief in the state, but we will not teach that Bible which we believe even to our children through teachers that we pay with our money. No, no, it isn’t the teaching of the Bible, and we are not asking it. The question is can a minority in this state come in and compel a teacher to teach that the Bible is not true and make the parents of these children pay the expenses of the teacher to tell their children what these people believe is false and dangerous? Has it come to a time when the minority can take charge of a state like Tennessee and compel the majority to pay their teachers while they take religion out of the heart of the children of the parents who pay the teachers?

. . .

So, my friends, if that were true, if man and monkey were in the same class, called primates, it would mean they did not come up from the same order. It might mean that instead of one being the ancestor of the other they were all cousins. But it does not mean that they did not come from the lower animals, if this is the only place they could come from, and the Christian believes man came from above, but the evolutionist believes he must have come from below.

Source: William Jennings Bryan, First Speech, in The World’s Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case (1925; reprint, Dayton, TN: Rhea County Historical Society, 1978).