Poole Bills [1]

Poole Bills

by Jerry Leath Mills, 2006

The Poole Bills [2], also called "Poole Monkey Bills," were a series of attempts in the 1920s by General Assembly [3] member D. Scott Poole [4] to outlaw the teaching of evolution in state-supported schools. Inspired by actions of the Tennessee legislature that precipitated the infamous Scopes Trial [5] of 1920, and backed by fundamentalist forces centered around a committee of 100 churchmen of the North Carolina Presbyterian Synod, Poole introduced his first bill in 1925 and saw it defeated by a narrow margin. In February 1927 Poole's bill was reintroduced and defeated in committee by a margin of 25 to 11 after a rousing speech by Paul J. Ryan, a law student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill [6]. Victory for the bill's opponents was widely attributed to some presentations and debates in Charlotte [7] sponsored by former students of Horace Williams [8] (1858-1940), the controversial philosophy professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Additional Resources:

The Evolution Controvery in North Carolina in the 1920's, UNC Libraries:

Primary Sources: http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/evolution/primarysources.html [9]

Glossary: http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/evolution/glossary.html [10]

Subjects:

N.C. Industrial Revolution (1900-1929) [11]

Law and legal history [12]

Religion [13]

UNC Press [14]

Authors:

Mills, Jerry Leath [15]

From:

Encyclopedia of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press. [16]

1 January 2006 | Mills, Jerry Leath