Part 2, Chapter 5 Jockeying for Position Summary

In June, Scopes went to New York to confer with ACLU officials, who wanted to make Scopes look as all-American as possible. Scopes also met with three well-known scientists: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a paleontologist, the psychologist J. McKeen Cattell, and Charles B. Davenport, a eugenicist. These three men would help shape public response to the Scopes trial. Osborn had already been debating with Bryan for years over the teaching of evolution and in the wake of the upcoming trial, he increased his efforts to show human evolution's compatibility with Christianity. With the publicity given to the trial by these three men, curiosity about evolution became widespread. Books about evolution sold briskly. Liberal ministers spoke out about the Scopes trial, and some even volunteered to serve as defense experts.

Although middle ground existed between the modernists...