{"id":498,"date":"2024-07-09T21:53:56","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T03:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/?p=498"},"modified":"2024-07-09T23:08:59","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T05:08:59","slug":"the-99th-anniversary-of-the-scopes-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"The 99th Anniversary of the Scopes Trial"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Scopes trial ran from July 10th to the 21st, 1925.<\/p>\n

\"ChimpanzeeFor a long time I’ve enjoyed studying the Scopes trial, an event that saw a convergence of legal theory and practice, Southern culture, libertarianism, the history of the Fundamentalist movement, and scientism.\u00a0 The preeminent attorney for the defense, Clarence Darrow, cared little for free speech and nothing for the defendant, John Scopes; his goal in taking the case for no fee was atheism.\u00a0 The ACLU, bankrollers of the show trial, were founded by Roger Baldwin, whose most famous quotation is “Communism is the goal.”\u00a0 The handful of civic leaders in Dayton, Tennessee who volunteered to host the show trial cared nothing for the Bible, science, Communism, or atheism; they just wanted “to put Dayton on the map.”\u00a0 In that, they succeeded like pepperoni pizza.\u00a0 I think that it took O. J. Simpson to knock the Scopes trial out of first place.<\/p>\n

John Scopes never even taught evolution; he just agreed to lie and say he did so that a trial could occur.\u00a0 He didn’t participate in the trial.\u00a0 He later said that his contribution was to provide a warm body to sit in the defendant’s chair.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed teaching it in my college course on American church history.\u00a0 I made a grave error once, however.\u00a0 To demonstrate the antichristian propaganda that now perverts the history of the event, I showed the class five minutes of the film “Inherit the Wind.”\u00a0 One young lady, on the final exam, gave me the movie version instead of what I had taught.<\/p>\n

It was the first trial to be broadcast live across the nation and it captured the nation’s attention.\u00a0 Likewise, the ridicule heaped upon it by the eminently talented reporter H. L. Mencken also became part of the nation’s memory.<\/p>\n

If today’s descriptions of the event aren’t grossly twisted, they still tend to miss the key dynamics that explain the actions of the characters.\u00a0 This is the challenge of historiography: the writer has to choose, out of millions of data bits, the things which he<\/em><\/strong> believes explain the events and their aftermath.\u00a0 In this case, if he doesn’t understand Fundamentalism, Marxism, scientism, atheism, and the South of 1925, he’s going to get it wrong.\u00a0 Oh, they all THINK that they understand, but, as I said, that’s the cigar butt in the punch bowl of historiography.<\/p>\n

I highly recommend\u00a0Summer for the Gods<\/em> by Edward Larson.\u00a0 His mastery of the material is stellar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Scopes trial ran from July 10th to the 21st, 1925. For a long time I’ve enjoyed studying the Scopes trial, an event that saw a convergence of legal theory and practice, Southern culture, libertarianism, the history of the Fundamentalist movement, and scientism.\u00a0 The preeminent attorney for the defense, Clarence Darrow, cared little for free … Continue reading “The 99th Anniversary of the Scopes Trial”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p45dxY-82","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":502,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions\/502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}