(1860-1925)

As leader of the Progressive cause in the Democratic party, three-time candidate for President of the United States, and Secretary of State in the cabinet of President Woodrow Wilson, Bryan was sustained by his faith in the "democracy of the heart." He was devoted to peace and arbitrated treaties with 30 countries under Wilson, but eventually resigned his position as Secretary of State for Wilson and his cabinet opposed treaties. He then threw himself into Prohibition, and his last crusade was the one that drew him directly into the fundamentalist movement, the effort to outlaw the teaching of evolution on the public schools of America.

Bitter opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools brought about the Scopes trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. Bryan was the prosecuting lawyer, and Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) defended John T. Scopes. Scopes lost the case, and several Southern legislatures passed laws banning

The Eighteenth Amendment outlawed alcoholic beverages across the country after January, 1920. This was probably the last successful evangelical crusade for a moral America. William Jennings Bryan wrote that those who labored for prohibition "are helping to create conditions which will bring the highest good to the greatest number, … for it is not injustice to any man to refuse him permission to enrich himself by injuring his fellowmen."

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Prohibition, William-Jennings-Bryan[/tags]