BRYAN,WILLIAM,JENNINGS AS DEMOSTHENES - THE SCOPES TRIAL AND THE UNDELIVERED ORATION, ON EVOLUTION

The 1925 Scopes Trial was a spectacle of contradictions, many of which center on William Jennings Bryan who has long been portrayed as havin g been ''broken'' by the proceedings. A close reading of Bryan's last, undelivered speech, On Evolution, however, supports a revisionist ass essment of Bryan's last days. The speech is a sophisticated rhetorical production in which Bryan attempts to employ ''incompatibility,'' a t erm developed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, as an argumentative st rategy. Far from being the work of a broken or inconsistent person, th e speech implies that Bryan was well-aware of the nature of the trial and was able to creatively engage its most salient feature for his own argument.