by William Trollinger

Burning of 80 ft. cross, KKK, August 9, 1925.

Jerry Bergman’s campaign to invent an anti-racist William Jennings Bryan continues apace. This time, it involves a review of Brenda Wineapple’s best-selling book on the Scopes Trial. 

It is telling that Bergman begins his Journal of Creation review, entitled “The Scopes Trial’s false conclusions live on,”  by whining that while Keeping the Faith is ranked #9 in Amazon’s “Science and Religion” category and is in 721 libraries, his own book – The Other Side of the Scopes Monkey Trial – is #1047 in the same Amazon category, and has been placed in only 88 libraries. He blames some of the lack of attention for his book on the “greying of the creationist movement,” as “many people who had supported my work are now deceased.” He does not consider the possibility that his book doesn’t sell because, it is – as Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education has observed – the worst book ever written on the Scopes Trial. 

The first part of Bergman’s review involves an extended complaint about Wineapple’s treatment of Bryan’s relationship with the Klan. As Bergman notes, she acknowledges that Bryan was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but she goes on to question why he did not actively oppose the organization. Bergman’s defense?  The Klan was too powerful for Bryan to oppose, as in the 1920s it had five million members and dominated seven state governments. A “political career in the South, and some northern states such as Indiana, required the Klan’s support,” as “without it, holding office was difficult, if not impossible.”  

This is Bergman’s defense of Bryan’s silence? He was too politically calculating (craven), too cowardly, to speak out? What about all those Americans – white and black – who did muster the political and ethical and religious courage to resist the KKK? And should we understand Bergman’s argument as a subtle defense of contemporary evangelicals and Republicans who can’t find the wherewithal to speak out against the Trump Administration’s egregious and ever-escalating immoral, racist, and anti-Constitutional actions?

Moreover, in working to distance Bryan from the KKK, and undercut one of Wineapple’s “false conclusions,” Bergman completely fails to explain why the 1920s Klan loved Bryan, to the point that they commemorated his death with the burning of crosses. Here in Dayton, the huge burning cross carried this inscription: “In memory of William Jennings Bryan, the greatest Klansman of our time, this cross is burned, he stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord.” 

If Bryan was the great civil rights champion that Bergman claims he was, how did the KKK miss the point? 

In his review of Wineapple’s book, Bergman is covering much of the same ground as he did in his July 2025 Creation-Evolution Headlines article, “1925 Scopes Trial 100-Year Anniversary: Evolutionists are Still Teaching Myths.” Once again, he makes use of Willard Smith’s 1969 Journal of Negro History article, “William Jennings Bryan and Racism.” Once again he quotes from Smith’s first paragraph:

Bryan believed democracy ‘is founded upon the doctrine of human brotherhood – a democracy that exists for one purpose, [that is, for] the defense of human rights. It would be extremely difficult to select from his political career, lasting from 1890 to his death in 1925, a concept which he emphasized more than this.

And, once again, Bergman leaves out what Smith has to say in the rest of his article:

  • There was a contradiction in Bryan’s “life that certainly did not square with his much-vaunted talk about democracy and rule by the people,” and that contradiction involved “Bryan’s attitude toward race relations,” attitudes that were “acceptable to the strict segregationist” (127).
  • Bryan asserted that “social equality should be opposed on the ground that amalgamation of the races is not desirable . . . and amalgamation [including racial intermarriage] would be the ‘logical result of social equality” (139-140).
  • Bryan attacked Theodore Roosevelt’s “appointments of Negroes to office, again [taking] the southern white’s point of view” (141).
  • Bryan did not oppose Woodrow Wilson’s segregating of government workers, and opposed the 1922 anti-lynching bill then before Congress.
  • In 1923 Bryan gave a speech at the Southern Society in Washington, D.C., in which he proclaimed that

Where two races are forced to live together, the more advanced race “will always control as a matter of self-preservation not only for the benefit of the advanced race, but for the benefit of the backward race also. . . . Slavery was an improvement over independence in Africa. The very progress that the blacks have made, when – and only when – brought into contact with the whites, ought to be a sufficient argument in support of white supremacy . . . Anyone who will look at the subject without prejudice will know that white supremacy promotes the highest welfare of both races.

Yep. Not so surprising that the Ku Klux Klan celebrated William Jennings Bryan as “the greatest Klansman.” And not so surprising that Jerry Bergman continues to distort the historical record for ideological purposes. 

And see here for my more extended treatment of Bergman’s “1925 Scopes Trial 100-Year Anniversary.”