In the early part of the 1910s in the US, a small but influential movement to eliminate Darwinism and evolution from public education started to gain some legislative momentum, eventually resulting in laws forbidding such instruction and ending in one of the great trials of the century: the Scopes Trial of 1925. The trial became a radio and media spectacle featuring two of the best-known orators of the age: populist and perennial presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan and legal star for civil and constitutional rights Clarence Darrow. The two adversaries had once been friends and colleagues but fell out primarily over their religious views. Bryan famously took a swipe at geology, Charles Lyell, what his scientific investigations wrought in relation to the age of the earth, and Church dogma on the matter by saying, ‘Better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the age of rocks.’ The trial became a circus, in spite of the seriousness of the legal issues at stake, open-air tents containing preachers contending with hawkers of everything from food to cloth to special occasion goods.