A CENTURY AGO, THE ‘SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL’ SHOOK THE NATION. THE STAKES ARE JUST AS HIGH TODAY:
What many Americans know about the Scopes trial is actually based on a popular play and film inspired by the trial. “Inherit The Wind” tells the story of a teacher prosecuted by a small religious town for teaching human evolution. The play, which is often taught in schools, portrays critics of evolution as backwards fanatics denying scientific evidence.
Critics say “Inherit the Wind” misleads the public about key facts about the case, whitewashes inconvenient facts about the biology textbook in question, and has perpetuated stereotypes about opponents of evolution as backward rubes.
Dr. John West, the vice president of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, told The Daily Wire that there are many facts of the case that don’t come across in its telling. For example, the 1925 textbook at the center of the Scopes trial — Civic Biology, by George Hunter — was deeply racist and promoted eugenics.
“The dirty little secret that very few people actually talk about … is that Hunter’s civic biology was a ravingly racist and pro-eugenics book,” West told The Daily Wire. “It’s kind of a riot today because if you actually tried to teach out of that textbook today, teachers would probably be fired.”
For example, the textbook said that the Caucasian race was the “highest type of all” humans, and said some people were “parasites” unfit to reproduce.
“If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading,” the textbook said. “Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”
West also said that Bryan, the progressive Democrat politician who helped prosecute Scopes, saw the trial as a battle for parental rights. Bryan believed that parents should not be forced to send their kids to government schools that would undermine their Christian faith. Instead, he believed the teachers should avoid the issue of human origins altogether, according to West.
Related: A Forgotten Lesson of the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial.’
We already have seen what happens when this suffocating ideology is given a free hand. When the United States indoctrinated its citizens in the dogma of eugenics, the results were catastrophic: a widening and deepening of institutional racism, xenophobic anti-immigration policies, and the coercive sterilization of “the unfit.” And it was all justified in the name of “progress,” supported by the scientific and academic establishments.
“Could any doctrine be more destructive of civilization?” Bryan asked. The answer arrived soon enough: The event that brought all of it to a screeching halt was the Holocaust. It is well known that the Nazis based their 1933 sterilization laws on the work of American eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his efforts to promote “race hygiene.”
Exit quote: “Hitler’s death camps were the horrific yet logical result of the militant rejection of the God of the Bible.”