“Maybe WJB wasn’t the bellicose blow hard that they made him out to be in that movie.”
The movie was a theatrical fiction — good drama, but totally unhistorical.
The real WJB was calm throughout; he also said that if Darwinist views were accepted, then in twenty years nations would be executing people on a darwinian basis. (He was off by about ten years — Hitler came sooner than that.)
Its true that the social eugenics movement that arose in the US in the ‘20s and ‘30s was a completely unscientific and bigoted interpretation of Darwin’s natural selection. It was President Woodrow Wilson that did much to legitimize and institutionalize eugenics into government policy and was much admired and mimicked by Hitler in Nazi Germany.
The Snopes trial was a publicity stunt cooked up by the ACLU to embarrass Southern biblical literalists. They contrived to have Snopes charged with the crime of teaching evolution as a ploy to promote their eugenicist ideology. Darrow was brought in as a prop lawyer because of his national reputation and agnostic views on religion.
The creationist/evolutionist debate should have been resolved with the universal rejection of eugenics after the holocaust and the discoveries of molecular biology and genomics in the ‘50s and ‘60s but deeply held beliefs about human origins are still in the process of evolving.