A Teacher Taught Science

“Those who believed in the letter of the Bible and refused to accept any teaching, even of science, which seemed to conflict with it, began in 1921 to call themselves Fundamentalists…The position of the Fundamentalists seemed almost hopeless. The tide of all rational thought in a rational age seemed to be running against them. But they were numerous, and at least there was no doubt about where they stood. Particularly in the South they controlled the big Protestant denominations. And they fought strenuously…They introduced into the legislatures of nearly half the states of the Union bills designed to forbid the teaching of the doctrine of evolution; in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and South Carolina they pushed such bills through one house of the legislature only to fail in the other; and in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Mississippi they actually succeeded in writing their anachronistic wishes into law.”

“There was something to be said for the right of the people to decide what should be taught in their tax-supported schools, even if what they decided upon was ridiculous.”

“The evidence ranged all the way from the admission of fourteen-year-old Howard Morgan that Scopes had told him about evolution and that it hadn’t hurt him any, to the estimate of a zoologist that life had begun something like six hundred million years ago (an assertion which caused gasps and titters of disbelief from the rustics in the audience).”

“…[Clarence] Darrow declared that his purpose in examining [William Jennings] Bryan was ‘to show up Fundamentalism…to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States.’” 

With regard to the Scopes-Monkey Trial

From Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, published 1931

From the "How Dare You Criticize the Former (and Late) President" Collection

"The fact was that any relentless investigation of the scandals threatened to disturb, if only slightly, the status quo, and disturbance of the status quo was the last thing that the dominant business class or the country at large wanted."

With regard to the scandal-ridden Harding administration

From Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, published 1931

More Familiarity

"...the division of public opinion on the case was largely a division between those who thought radicals ought to be strung up on general principles and those who thought that the test of the country's civilization lay in the scrupulousness with which it protected the rights of minorities."


Regarding the Sacco and Vanzetti trials

From Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, published 1931

On Fear Mongering (Sound Familiar)

"Innumerable patriotic societies had sprung up, each with its executive secretary, and executive secretaries must live, and therefore must conjure up new and ever greater menaces. Innumerable other gentleman now discovered that they could defeat whatever they wanted to defeat my tarring it conspicuously with the Bolshevist brush. Big-navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book sensors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin…A cloud of suspicion hung in the air, and intolerance became an American virtue."


Regarding the fear of Communism in America following the 1917 Russian Revolution

From Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, published 1931