Part 1, Chapter 2 Government by the People Summary

With new fossil discoveries and discussion of evolution, anti-evolutionists responded to the evidence and called for restrictions on teaching evolution in schools. Some decried the fossils as frauds or challenged their antiquity. The anti-evolution movement developed during the 1920s. It developed in the direction it did because of fundamentalists' opposition to modernism and because of William Jennings Bryan's leadership.

Fundamentalism grew out of several different strands of conservative Christianity. Leaders within the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations stressed the divine inspiration of the Bible and literal interpretations of Biblical accounts. The holiness movement, from the Methodist church, and Pentecostalism brought to the movement large numbers of believers who were ready to fight the teaching of evolution. "The culprit, they all agreed, was a form of theological liberalism known as 'modernism' that was gaining acceptance...