Politics & Power Quote by William Jennings Bryan

A diagnosis that grand is less argument than provocation: blame modernity itself, then dress it up as a curriculum dispute. When William Jennings Bryan thunders that "all the ills" of America flow from teaching evolution, he is not doing biology; he is doing politics. The line works because it offers a single villain for an anxious, rapidly changing country - industrial capitalism, urban life, immigration, loosening sexual norms, labor unrest - and locates that villain in the classroom, where power feels recoverable.

Bryan’s specific intent is disciplinary. If evolution can be framed as the root of moral decay, then banning it becomes a form of national therapy. The subtext is a warning about authority: who gets to narrate reality, scripture or science, church or university, the small-town pulpit or the metropolitan expert. Evolution, in Bryan’s telling, is not a theory but an ethic: it smuggles in a brutal social logic (the strong triumph, the weak deserve their fate) that he believed could sanctify exploitation and eugenics. That fear wasn’t invented; Social Darwinist rhetoric was in the air. But Bryan’s move is to collapse descriptive science into prescriptive morality, then indict the whole modern order.

Context sharpens the edge. Bryan is the populist titan of the early 20th century, famous as the voice of agrarian and religious America, and later the public face of the anti-evolution crusade culminating in the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial". The line is a rallying cry for cultural counterrevolution: a demand that the nation’s story remain providential, not accidental, and that democratic faith outrank professional expertise.