Excellent piece at Lew Rockwell this morning about the ACLU and the Scopes trial. Packed with facts and solid analysis. Link. A few excerpts:
We must remember that at this early stage the Russian experiment with Communism seemed to be working ”“ this was years before Stalin's brutal purges. So groups such as the Communist Party of the USA, the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World and the Friends of the Soviet Union were actively involved in implementing Socialism in the United States. It was in this environment that the American Civil Liberties Union was conceived. When it was formed in 1920, its board of directors contained many of the prominent members of these organizations and the ACLU shared an office with the Communist Party's newspaper, New Masses.
The ACLU went out of its way to avoid being perceived as a political organization; even its name was carefully chosen to sound innocuous ”“ after all, who could object to an organization that protected civil liberties? But its founder, Roger Baldwin, let the cat out of the bag with his statement: "Civil liberties, like democracy, are useful only as tools for social change." The newly formed ACLU needed a high profile case as a vehicle to establish its significance and it thought it had found one when Tennessee passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. So it placed ads in major Tennessee newspapers seeking a volunteer to teach evolution with the promise of free legal protection. . .
Contrary to the "standard version," Bryan was not a rigid religious fundamentalist who took every word in the Bible literally. In fact, he showed an early interest in Darwin's theory of evolution because he felt it was compatible with the creation of the world by God. Bryan thoroughly studied all of Darwin's ideas ”“ not just On the Origin of the Species but also The Descent of Man (I have always wondered why Darwin didn't call his work, The Ascent of Man?) Bryan's research effectively ended his support of Darwin's ideas, especially for what has been labeled "Social Darwinism." Consequently, Bryan strongly objected to the textbook used to teach evolution in 1925; a textbook that the "standard version" does not mention.
Today, that textbook, A Civic Biology by George William Hunter, would be considered racist and callous. Following Darwin's example, Hunter classified humans into racial groupings and ranked races according to how far each has advanced up the evolutionary scale. Hunter's book contains this language: There are "five races or varieties of man”¦the Ethiopian or Negro type”¦the Malay or brown race”¦the American Indian”¦the Mongolian or yellow race”¦and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."
