Fundamentalist Fool or Populist Paragon?: William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign Against Evolutionary Theory

This essay revisits William Jennings Bryan's campaign against evolutionary theory through analysis of four rhetorical moments—his platform orations "The Prince of Peace" (beginning in 1904) and "The Menace of Darwinism" (beginning in 1921), his testimony at the Scopes Trial, and his undelivered closing speech, "On Evolution." In contrast to popular memory of Bryan as the fundamentalist fool, I maintain that he shared little rhetorical ground with his fundamentalist contemporaries, who tended to make arguments that used scientific reasoning to prove empirical facts of religious truth. Instead, Bryan opposed evolution through what Michael Lee has called the "populist argumentative frame," a rhetorical orientation devoted to guarding the interests of the common people against an oppressive elite. Recognizing the populist foundations to Bryan's anti-evolution discourse, as well as the absence of fundamentalism in his discourse, helps to explain how Bryan fared so badly on the stand at the Scopes Trial.