🐒 The Glitched Gavel S01E02: The State vs. The Syllabus (The Scopes Trial)
Gavel (The Narrator/Prosecutor): "Dayton, Tennessee, 1925. The air is thick with humidity and the fever of belief. A young high school teacher, John Scopes, stands accused not of murder, but of treason against the Divine Word. He dared to teach Darwin, violating the Butler Act, setting the stage for a trial that was less about law and more about the soul of America. This episode, we open the dusty, distorted files on a case that pitted the urban modern against the rural fundamentalist." (A blast of static briefly drowns out Gavel's voice, followed by the faint sound of an old-time radio announcer.)
Static (The Analyst/Defense): "The legal case was a sham, orchestrated by the ACLU and Dayton's own civic boosters, who saw a spectacle as a way to sell newspapers and revive a dying town. But the legal maneuvering quickly gave way to a philosophical cage match: the great agnostic Clarence Darrow vs. the fervent populist and three-time Presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. We analyze the shocking moment when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand—not as a prosecutor, but as an expert witness on the Bible."
Gavel: "We dissect the testimony that followed, a brutal cross-examination played out under the blistering summer sun, that forced the champion of Creationism to account for every literal word of Genesis. Did Darrow truly humiliate Bryan, striking a fatal blow against fundamentalism, or was the defense's performance merely an arrogant display of modernism that ultimately alienated the very jury they needed? The conviction was overturned on a technicality, but the war over what is taught in our classrooms rages on, echoing through the court systems of the glitched gavel."
(The audio ends with the sound of a large crowd cheering and arguing, interspersed with a recurring electronic buzzing and tape-warble.)
