Inherit the Wind

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}

> No one is saying that they teach such things today, in fact I specifically said that they don't, in my previous post. But YOU are saying that teaching such things has been specifically outlawed, at least for public schools. I highly doubt that, and won't believe it until I see a specific law saying so.

 

 

Check the anti-discrimination clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights act and updates of it, and the federal ?hate crime? laws, fair housing laws, etc.

 

A lot of these issues are covered in broad sweeping major federal and state laws about ?discrimination? that cover a lot of stuff. Old covenants like you describe are very common, but they can not be enforced because of modern civil rights laws. The same goes with teaching that some ?types? of humans are ?savages? and are closer to the ?apes? than Caucasians.

 

You might not find a specific law in a state that says, ?Calling any kind, type, or race of human being a ?savage? is illegal in state school textbooks.? But you will find very broad anti-discrimination laws on the federal level and in the states that will keep such material out of textbooks. So it is illegal to teach the things that Scopes taught in 1925. Public school textbooks today can not call whole families of people ?parasitic? or ?parasites?. This type of stuff is illegal and is covered by all kinds of federal and state laws.

[C.Bogle]

Actually you did say that. How could a film that takes place in 1925 refer to events that

supposedly happened after 1925? So, it's not that the film failed to mention these facts, it's

that it wouldn't contain in it events that supposedly happened after 1925.

 

The Civil Rights legislation of the mid 1960s was about giving equal rights to black citizens.

I doubt it had anything to do with what could be taught in public schools. I would take an

educated guess and say happened was that the racist concepts that appeared in a book like

A Civic Biology gradually were seen to be not only offensive but inaccurate and outmoded.

So over a period of time they disappeared from textbooks, due more to changes in people's

beliefs than any state making them illegal. The forty years between the Scopes trial and the

Civil Rights legislation was time enough for this to happen.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

> Actually you did say that. How could a film that takes place in 1925 refer to events that

> supposedly happened after 1925? So, it's not that the film failed to mention these facts, it's

> that it wouldn't contain in it events that supposedly happened after 1925.

 

The film was made in 1960. Historical films all the time run a roll of text at the end telling what happened long after the events in the film took place. For example, I was taught evolution in my schools in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1950s, but we weren?t taught eugenics, and the evolution stuff we were taught did not single out any particular group of people and say they were closer to apes, nor did it claim that Caucasians were the highest ?types? of people. This stuff could have been mentioned in ?Inherit the Wind?, but the film was designed as a deception to trick audiences, much like ?JFK? was designed for deception.

 

Also, the film avoided telling the audience what was in the textbook, although the textbook was discussed at the trial and entered into evidence at the trial.

 

The Civil Rights Act has been added to and amended over the years. Anti-discrimination laws cover all people, all types, nationalities, races, etc. And there are other anti-discrimination laws not related to the Civil Rights Act.

 

So the stuff taught by Scopes from that textbook can not be taught today, and you can?t show me a single public school textbook that teaches it.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

> in a book like

> A Civic Biology gradually were seen to be not only offensive but inaccurate and outmoded.

>

 

 

Well of course. And Bryan was one of the first to try to combat those types of books. That?s what really happened at the trial in 1925. But that?s not in the movie.

 

What was taught in that book was way obsolete in 1925, since it was old 19th Century racist stuff from England, which had many colonies in third-world nations. Remember that William Jennings Bryan was against it. It was Clarence Darrow and the ACLU lawyers who wanted to keep that book in the public schools. The progressives in those days were the big-time eugenicists of that era. But the film fraudulently made Bryan look like a crackpot and Darrow like a sensible wonderful man.

 

Here?s what Darwin wrote in 1871 in ?The Descent of Man?:

 

?At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Prof. Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.?

 

And this stuff was way out of date when it was taught in ?A Civic Biology?. People didn?t learn how dangerous this type of teaching was until the concentration camps were opened by the Allied troops in Germany and Europe in 1945. After that, all of a sudden, evolutionary/eugenics teaching began to disappear from American public school textbooks, so that it was not taught to me in schools in the 1950s. I didn?t begin to learn about it in detail until I began studying the Scopes case.

[C.Bogle]

Apparently the people behind Inherit the Wind wanted to focus on the trial, its effects on

the community, and the larger debate about evolution, and not on what happened years after

the trial. It wasn't designed to deceive the audience, it was "designed" to concentrate on those

elements that the people involved in it chose. Like many films based on historical events, it isn't

entirely accurate, but I would guess Inherit is a lot closer to fact than JFK. If it was a documentary,

it might have focused more on what was in the textbook, but it's not a documentary, it's a retelling

of events using the dramatic form at its disposal. Yes the Civil Rights Act covered many forms of

discrimination, but I doubt it covered anything about what would be taught about evolution in public

school classes. No public school teaches it today because it is no longer deemed scientifically

accurate, not because it became illegal to teach it.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

> Apparently the people behind Inherit the Wind wanted to focus on the trial,

 

The film and play were so inaccurate they couldn?t use the real names of the principle characters involved or the name of the town involved, and they didn?t dare mention the name of the actual textbook involved or read from it the five pages about evolution that I?ve posted here, and the film didn?t focus on the real trial transcript or the real events of the trial. And it added crazy characters who were not real and who didn't exist and weren't at the trial in real life.

 

And the movie incorrectly showed the Marsh character falling over dead in the courtroom at the end of the film, but this did not happen. The movie made it seem as if Marsh's death was caused by him being outwitted by Spencer Tracy.

[cujas]

*Inherit the Wind* is a great film and marvelous acting. Gene Kelly's line as H.L. Mencken is worth the price of admission--"Hello, Devil (to Tracy) welcome to Hell."

 

Having said all that, the film is a deliberate mockery and indictment of The Bible and anyone who disagrees with evolution.

 

I don't mind March dropping dead in the courtroom--he died a few days or a week later from the stress--they do have literary license.

 

What I do mind is the hateful way all the Christians are presented in the film. We're not all idiotic and intolerant. But I suppose that's literary license too.

[JakeHolman]

> {quote:title=cujas wrote:}{quote}

> *Inherit the Wind* is a great film and marvelous acting. Gene Kelly's line as H.L. Mencken is worth the price of admission--"Hello, Devil (to Tracy) welcome to Hell."

>

> Having said all that, the film is a deliberate mockery and indictment of The Bible and anyone who disagrees with evolution.

>

> I don't mind March dropping dead in the courtroom--he died a few days or a week later from the stress--they do have literary license.

>

> What I do mind is the hateful way all the Christians are presented in the film. We're not all idiotic and intolerant. But I suppose that's literary license too.

 

*Having said all that, the film is a deliberate mockery and indictment of The Bible and anyone who disagrees with evolution.*

 

*Ditto*

 

Put me down as one of those who thinks, unequivocally,the teaching of evolution is one the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the human race...

[ValentineXavier]

> {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}

>

> Put me down as one of those who thinks, unequivocally,the teaching of evolution is one the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the human race...

 

Are you also a member of The Flat Earth Society?

[FilmAficionado]

LOL., Valentine Xavier. Good one! Some would use ten paragraphs to reply. You couldn't do better in ten words.

 

Edited by: FilmAficionado on Feb 28, 2011 10:17 PM

[JakeHolman]

> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}

> > {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}

> >

> > Put me down as one of those who thinks, unequivocally,the teaching of evolution is one the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the human race...

>

> Are you also a member of The Flat Earth Society?

 

Hardly, I'm in the camp who believes in Intelligent Design or ID...

[ValentineXavier]

So, I would assume that you would call the fact that human fetuses have gills at one point an Intelligent Jest.

[C.Bogle]

If Bryan thought the trial was about combating racist textbooks, he was misinformed and was

in the wrong place. The trial was about a teacher who had violated the Butler Act and thus

was on trial for that act.

 

Why presume that what was okay for 19th century British racists wouldn't also be acceptable

to American racists in 1914 or 1925? I would venture that it wasn't obsolete, at least in the

non-scientific world, and was likely acceptable for some years after 1925. Whether Bryan

was against the idea of Caucasians as a superior race and its promulgation in textbooks, I

don't know, but again that was not what the Scopes trial was about. And I doubt Darrow

was even that familiar with the textbook itself, and he certainly wasn't there because he

wanted to keep the racist passages of the book in the public schools. He was there to defend

the teaching of evolution in public schools. Perhaps some Progressives believed in eugenics,

but Darrow was not among them. He wrote an anti-eugenics essay for Mencken's American

Mercury in 1926. Bryan does not seem to have mentioned eugenics during the trial. The

film made Bryan look like a Biblical literalist and Darrow like a skeptic. That seems, in general

terms, a fair representation.

 

Fortunately, science relies on evidence to come to its conclusions,

and not the stray opinions of John Q. Public

[JakeHolman]

> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}

> So, I would assume that you would call the fact that human fetuses have gills at one point an Intelligent Jest.

 

The early grooves in the human embryo that appear to look like gills are really the early stages of the formation of the face, throat and neck regions.

 

ID seriously

 

[chaney7]

Wether Darrow actually said it or it's just a line from the script: "I have the right to think". I think science offers a more plausable explanation. I think schools should turn students on to both options as opposed to offering one or the other. Of course, steering clear of both eliminates the problem.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

> And I doubt Darrow

> was even that familiar with the textbook itself,

 

You are just guessing and making stuff up, trying to cover up for a movie that was designed to deceive the public.

 

Page 132 of the trial transcript:

 

 

Page 195 of ?A Civic Biology?, 1914 edition:

 

[C.Bogle]

In the specific case of how familiar Darrow was with the textbook, that is a

guess, because I'm not sure. The textbook is over 400 pages long, of which

the evolution section is only five or six. So I don't know how much of it he

read. Your excerpt from the transcript, without further context, doesn't really

show very much.

 

Speaking of making things up, where is the evidence for your idea that the movie

was made in order to deceive the public? It was simply the film version of a

play dealing with a specific event in 1925. Is there some proof that it's not that,

but some kind of conspiracy?

 

And here's some more things you made up, without any evidence to back them up:

 

1) In the mid 1920s the ACLU was trying to control the textbooks and curricula of

every state school system.

 

2) It was illegal in all 50 states to teach evolution as presented in A Civic Biology.

 

3) Hitler learned about eugenics in public school.

 

I'll give you this. When you make things up, you do so on a grand scale.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

>Your excerpt from the transcript, without further context, doesn't really

> show very much.

 

It shows that your statement about Darrow not being very familiar with the textbook was wrong.

 

If you want a complete copy of the book, you can buy it yourself like I did.

[C.Bogle]

The excerpt is too short to show much of anything, except that Darrow quoted

a passage from the book. That's not the same thing as being familiar with the

book. And it's much less significant than the three whoppers you've come up with.

 

While it probably has some historical interest, I don't have the time or interest in

reading a ninety-seven year old textbook.

[ValentineXavier]

> {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}

> > {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}

> > So, I would assume that you would call the fact that human fetuses have gills at one point an Intelligent Jest.

>

> The early grooves in the human embryo that appear to look like gills are really the early stages of the formation of the face, throat and neck regions.

>

> ID seriously

>

>

 

In the photos I have seen, the vestigial gills are on the sides of well-formed necks, with well-formed heads. I have not dissected one, but with the description of "vestigial gills" in scientific texts, I think there must be more analogous tissue than just "grooves." We also have vestigial tails, and other vestigial organs, as do many animals. Some whales have vestigial limbs, buried in their bodies. But, as this is hardly the place to argue the truth of evolution, and logic and facts rarely triumph over some people's faith, I will desist in this line of argument.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

>

> While it probably has some historical interest, I don't have the time or interest in

> reading a ninety-seven year old textbook.

 

So you try to get all your ?history? from Hollywood movies. LOL.

 

Eugenics was well known in Europe and English speaking countries way back in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and it was commonly taught in schools as part of the evolution theory. Early in the 20th Century it began to be taught not only as a scientific theory but as a scientific fact that needed to be put into practice in the ?civilized? countries around the world. It was put into practice in Europe and English speaking countries early in the 20th Century and it was taught in schools in the US and Europe.

 

The old books are becoming more easy to find on the internet now. I used to have to go to dozens of old-book stores in different cities around the country to find these rare old books from the late 19th and early in the 20th Century. I found the ?A Civic Biology? book in a book store in Louisiana in the early 1990s, and I found a transcript of the Scopes trial in a book store in Colorado in the late ?90s or early ?00s.

 

You need to expand your own library and read some books about the history of biology and biology education in the Western World.

 

Here?s what Charles Darwin wrote in ?The Descent of Man?, 1871:

 

? But all these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Prof. Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.?

 

Darwin?s books were read, studied, and taught in universities around the world in the 19th Century. Also there were plenty of other books taught in the schools that eventually led to the Nazi eugenics project of the 1930s and ?40s.

 

http://www.trueorigin.org/holocaust.asp

http://www.archive.org/details/historyofcreatio76hist

 

?The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in particular? / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by E. Ray Lankester (1876)

----------------

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race

 

http://www.archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft_djvu.txt

 

"The New Decalogue of Science" by Albert Edward Wiggam

 

See the Time Magazine review: New Books: Mar. 31, 1924

 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,718140,00.html

 

?The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

 

THE NEW DECALOGUE OF SCIENCE? Albert Edward Wiggam?Bobbs Merrill ($2.50). An outspoken, thoughtful appeal to solve the eternal triangle of God, Man and the Devil through the instruments of Science now available and through new standards of conduct. Mr. Wiggam is a lecturer and professor. This is his first book?a powerful new viewpoint that does not gloss over the status of civilization with honeyed words of praise and glorification. The book is divided in two parts.

 

The first part consists of five warnings to mankind: 1) that the advanced races; of mankind are going backwards; 2) that heredity is the chief maker of men; 3) that the Golden Rule without Science will wreck the race that tries it; 4) that Medicine, Hygiene and Sanitation will weaken the human race; 5) that Morals, Education, Art and Religion will not improve the race.

 

The second part gives the Ten Commandments of Science or the duties of man to bring about reconstruction through scientific research, eugenics, humanization of industry, preferential reproduction, etc. Excerpts: "One of the outstanding results of civilization is that it has made the world safe for stupidity." "America is simply 'hellbent' on taking a brief biological joy ride, with the definite policy of later turning over its vast intellectual conquests to the morons."

[ValentineXavier]

> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}

> At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.

 

Sadly, that came all-too-close to being true, and was actually taking place in Darwin's time, i.e. the genocide of Native Americans by the European invaders. Of course we use more polite terms than "savage races" today.

[JakeHolman]

> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}

> > {quote:title=JakeHolman wrote:}{quote}

> > > {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}

> > > So, I would assume that you would call the fact that human fetuses have gills at one point an Intelligent Jest.

> >

> > The early grooves in the human embryo that appear to look like gills are really the early stages of the formation of the face, throat and neck regions.

> >

> > ID seriously

> >

> >

>

> In the photos I have seen, the vestigial gills are on the sides of well-formed necks, with well-formed heads. I have not dissected one, but with the description of "vestigial gills" in scientific texts, I think there must be more analogous tissue than just "grooves." We also have vestigial tails, and other vestigial organs, as do many animals. Some whales have vestigial limbs, buried in their bodies. But, as this is hardly the place to argue the truth of evolution, and logic and facts rarely triumph over some people's faith, I will desist in this line of argument.

 

*But, as this is hardly the place to argue the truth of evolution, and logic and facts rarely triumph over some people's faith, I will desist in this line of argument.*

 

Ah, I will desist, too but please, ID has adherents who are not adherents because of faith. I happen to be one who believes in ID who has that faith.

 

ID is a systematic system that uses scientific methods, not faith.

 

You have a good evening...

[C.Bogle]

As I've said a number of times, if you're looking for historical accuracy,

don't look for it at the movies.

 

I don't think anyone denies that eugenics had a vogue during that period, though

how far it was "put into practice" during the early 20th century in Europe and

the English speaking countries is another matter.

 

The belief that one race is superior to another long predates Darwin. See the

subject of slavery in America for one example. I think it was either Jefferson

or Washington who took a keen interest in the breeding status of their human

property. So nobody needed Darwin to get to the idea of race superiority.

 

Perhaps a small number of people read and studied Darwin's books. Most people

probably got a second-hand and distorted account through other mediums. That's

likely how Hitler got it. While "Darwinism" may have played a part in the Nazi killings

of Jews and others, it was likely Hitler's anti-Semitism that played the main role. The

anti-evolution site, the one that "exposes the myth of evolution," seems particularly eager

to link Darwin to the Nazis. They just might have an ax to grind that goes beyond the

historical evidence.

 

For many intelligent design was the only life raft available when the S. S. Creationism

sank.

[FredCDobbs]

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote}

> The

> anti-evolution site, the one that "exposes the myth of evolution," seems particularly eager

> to link Darwin to the Nazis. They just might have an ax to grind that goes beyond the

> historical evidence.

 

This was predicted specifically about Germany by William Jennins Bryan in 1925, in a speech he gave around Dayton, Tennessee about the time of the trial. He knew this was the natural result of the preaching of Darwinism and eugenics in Europe early in the 20th Century, and he even predicted it being carried to the extreme in Germany. This was well before Hitler took power in 1933:

 

Pages 336 and 337 of the Scopes Trial Transcript, published in 1925: