[gcruse]

there was never a movement to really enforce making people believe Jonah got munched by a whale until the aftermath of The Scopes Trial.

Could you expand on that a little?  I would have thought the Scopes trial was  a peak in fundmentalism, a reaction against Darwinism and not a low point that generated increased resistance.  While the verdict temporarily went against Scopes (it was reversed later on the grounds that the judge improperly instructed the jury), Bryan came off as an overheated fool.  Perhaps the pro-Bryan side got lost in history, though.  Certainly the subsequent rise of Aimee Semple McPherson showed there was plenty of passion left in the followers, but the success of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry indicated the skeptical were as skeptical as ever.

I would surmise that fundamentalism was swamped by the loose Roaring Twenties and only came back into the fore in the Depression years as misery visited on the economic class most likely to be religious became acute.

[.cnI redruM]

I'm arguing that The Scopes Trial was the first time these fundamentalists got really into attempting to direct US science, research and education. (Such as it was anywhere outside Arthur Holly Compton's physics laboratory).