Posted on by rjonakait

A Scopes Trial in Florida

I recently read Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson,which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Most of us know about the 1925 prosecution of John Scopes from the cartoonish but compelling 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. Of course, real life was more complicated than the drama, but the basic premise was correct: John Scopes was prosecuted for violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial depicted huge personalities important in American history. The movie had Spencer Tracy in the thinly-veiled Clarence Darrow role and the oft-underappreciated Frederic March as the William Jennings Bryan surrogate. (Tracy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and March forty miles away in Racine, three years apart. I have wondered if on the Inherit set they swapped reminiscences of boyhood romps on Lake Michigan beaches.) And in a daring bit of casting, Gene Kelly had the role of the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote commentary about the trial.

The movie seemingly portrays the triumph of rationality over the cramped world of closed-minded fundamental religion — the triumph of modernity over myth. However, the movie, based on the 1956 play, was aimed at McCarthyism more than fundamentalism just as The Crucible by Arthur Miller is not really about the Salem witch trials. (The opening cast of Broadway’s Inherit the Wind starred Ed Begley, Paul Muni, and a young Tony Randall as Mencken. It ran for over two years, and, of course, has been a staple of high schools and summer stock ever since.) Perhaps it was telling that one of the screenwriters for the Inherit film used a fictitious name for the credits because he had been blacklisted.  

Although William Jennings Bryan is portrayed in Inherit primarily as a religious buffoon, Summer for the Gods shows that he tried, given the populist he was, to cast the issue as one of democracy. He, and others, maintained that the people — speaking through their legislatures — had the right to control what was taught in the schools which they had created and funded.

The issues presented by the Scopes trial remain timely, most notably in Florida. Now, however, the issues are about more than science and religion. Religion may hover just below the surface, but Florida is raising again two of the most interwoven strands that have recurred throughout American history, sex and race.

The state, however, maintains that what is doing is not about religion, sex, or race; It is about protecting children. It is about who determines when children should be exposed to certain topics. It is about who determines the content of classes.

Indeed, a basic question about our public school is who controls the education? School boards, parents, state government, teachers, other educators, experts? There is no easy answer.

Few doubt that government sets at least broad requirements. And usually, educators determine how those requirements are to be satisfied. Perhaps a school board or the state legislature determines that a high school student must pass algebra to graduate. We would be surprised if that state agency developed a syllabus for the required course. Instead, the educators determine how the course is to be taught.

However, when issues of religion, sex, or race are present in a course, sometimes, as with Florida now and Tennessee in 1925, the government wants to control the course’s content. The state may say that the majority of people want them to control such content. However, since this happens primarily with issues of religion, sex, or race, and not with other topics, this is not really about majority or even parental control; if it were, the state would control content on all topics. No. It is only about religion, sex, or race.

Florida, however, is not merely mimicking 1925 Tennessee. It is going beyond the Volunteer State. Tennessee did not extend its meddling beyond the public high schools. It apparently assumed that its college students were rational enough, mature enough, and educated enough to be able to think for themselves. They did not require protection from whatever the state legislature thought pernicious. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, however, has taken this a step further. The Sunshine State’s governor does not believe that its college students are smart, educated, or mature enough to be able to come to their own decisions on these matters. DeSantis is seeking to control the content of university education as well as that in the lower schools.

Indeed, Florida has not stopped there. It seeks to mandate what can occur in corporate programs. This, of course, turns “conservatism” on its head. Promotion of free enterprise and minimal government regulation is a core tenet of conservatism. We should not be all that surprised that concerns about sex, race, and religion intrude into public education, for that has happened many times in our history. But it is a brave new world when the state decides to control corporate training in these matters.

Of course, we should be concerned about what is taught in our schools. However, as we consider who should determine curricular content, it is worth reflecting on what Curtis Wilkie reports in When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer. “In the middle of the twentieth century,” writes Wilkie, “any Mississippi schoolchild who achieved an eighth-grade education had been exposed to a state history textbook [Mississippi through Four Centuries] that told of the glories of the Klan.” In discussing Reconstruction, the textbook acknowledged that the Ku Klux Klan whipped and even killed Blacks “who had been giving trouble in a community. . . . The organization helped the South at a difficult time.”

However, now, a hundred years after the Scopes trial, I can imagine a prosecution of a Florida teacher who teaches the fact that on a per capita basis Florida had the most lynchings in this country.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Would you be whining about your work if you had an incredibly powerful job, could have it as long you wanted, work full-time nine months of the year, and make enough to put you in the top 2% of earners with the chance to make even more? And yet here is John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, publicly bemoaning that Americans question the legitimacy of his Court. Apparently, he is so unhappy that so many see his work as illegitimate that he is going to resign. Just kidding.

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.” George Eliot.

I have listened to the summer sounds. I take my coffee and reading material to the porch as the light is dawning and pause periodically to listen to the bird songs, even though I cannot identify any of the calls. After dinner and dusk, I take a book to the porch and pause in my reading to hear the symphony of the cicadas. During the daylight I hear deer, chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits rustling the dry leaves in the woodlot next to my reading spot. But, unfortunately, during the day I also hear the summer sounds of lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, and backhoes.

It must be a sign of age: I think of my youth as all the time before I was sixty-eight.

A fact that surprised me: The first medal awarded to an American at the 1936 Berlin Olympics was for art. Art competitions were part of the summer games until 1948.

Another fact that surprised me: Iceland has no ants.

A recurring question that mystifies me: Why are Americans so besotted with the un-American institution of the British royalty?

Sometimes when conservatives rail against critical race theory they betray complete ignorance of what it is. Perhaps they oppose it because they think that it is a system for picking horses.

 “In the middle of the twentieth century, any Mississippi schoolchild who achieved an eighth-grade education had been exposed to a state history textbook [Mississippi through Four Centuries] that told of the glories of the Klan. In discussing Reconstruction, it said the Klan whipped and even killed Blacks ‘who had been giving trouble in a community. . . . The organization helped the South at a difficult time.’” Curtis Wilkie, When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer. (2021).

Tony Horwitz, in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998), reports that a visitor to a civil war battlefield asked a park ranger why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks.

The philosopher said, “Half of wisdom is being silent when you have nothing to say.”

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First Sentences

“When he was old and allowed himself a reverie, he remembered the soil and the way it felt as it caressed his feet.” Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

“They were firing from the bell-tower with machine-gun bursts or careful rifle shots, according to our movements.” Leonardo Sciascia, Antimony.

“On January 16, 1934, a Nazi customs official arrived at the door of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology with a stack of papers.” Sam Apple, Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection.

“This was the day that Daniel vaulted the wall.” Louis de Bernières, The Dust That Falls from Dreams.

“The hillside on which the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were about to make such a grisly fool of Lieutenant Colonel William J. Fetterman was dun-colored and bare, with no cover save for broken rocks that looked as if they had been thrown down by a short-tempered God.” Sally Jenkins, The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation.

“Gramercy Park is the most wistful and the gentlest of the New York squares, and the Players Club is one of the handsomest buildings in it.” David Stacton, The Judges of the Secret Court: A Novel about John Wilkes Booth.

“’Remember the year 1763,’ the celebrated stage actor David Garrick told James Boswell.” Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. (History group.)

“Bill Rankin sat motionless before his typewriter, grimly seeking a lead for the interview he was about to write.” Earl Derr Biggers, Behind That Curtain.

“More than a decade later, racial antagonism still burned in Jones County, a south Mississippi setting with a complex history.” Curtis Wilkie, When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer.

“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.” Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn.

“Law is the intersection of language and power.” Fred R. Shapiro, The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations.

“I am lucky: I know what people say about me.” Lauren Belfer, City of Light.

“Why should we begin with biblical, Greek, and Roman wives?” Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife.

“The two suspects sat on mismatched furniture in the white and almost featureless lounge, waiting for something to happen.” Alex Pavesi, The Eighth Detective.