Posted on 08/01/2019 7:09:10 PM PDT by Perseverando
The Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 pitted EVOLUTION against CREATION.
Clarence Darrow defended EVOLUTION.
Darrow had previously defended Leopold and Loeb, the homosexual teenage thrill killers who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 just for the excitement.
Darrow obtained a pardon for antifa-type anarchists in 1886 who blew up a pipe bomb in Chicago's Haymarket Square which killed 7 policemen and injured 60 others.
The Haymarket Statue dedicated to the fallen policemen was blown up by Bill Ayers and the anarchist group Weather Underground on October 6, 1969, prior to the "Days of Rage" protests, then blown up again on October 6, 1970.
Clarence Darrow defended the "mentally deranged drifter" Patrick Eugene Prendergast in 1894 who confessed to murdering Chicago mayor Carter H. Harrison, Sr.
Darrow defended Eugene V. Debs, the American Railway Union leader who was prosecuted for instigating the destructive Pullman Railroad Strike which caused 30 deaths, wounded 57 and caused $80 million in property damages.
Clarence Darrow represented the Western Federation of Miners leaders charged with the 1905 murder of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg.
In 1911, the American Federation of Labor arranged for Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers.
The McNamara brothers were charged with dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building which killed 21 employees.
Implicated in bribing jurors, Darrow was banned from practicing law in California.
In 1925, Darrow unsuccessfully defended John Scopes, a Tennessee High school biology teacher who taught the theory of origins called "evolution."
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Maybe WJB wasn’t the bellicose blow hard that they made him out to be in that movie. Sounds like he wasn’t such a bad guy, and a democrat too.
Leo Frank was defended by Luther Rosser.
The John T. Scopes Trial--Vernon Dalhart (1925)
“Maybe WJB wasn’t the bellicose blow hard that they made him out to be in that movie.”
The movie was a theatrical fiction — good drama, but totally unhistorical.
The real WJB was calm throughout; he also said that if Darwinist views were accepted, then in twenty years nations would be executing people on a darwinian basis. (He was off by about ten years — Hitler came sooner than that.)
Its true that the social eugenics movement that arose in the US in the ‘20s and ‘30s was a completely unscientific and bigoted interpretation of Darwin’s natural selection. It was President Woodrow Wilson that did much to legitimize and institutionalize eugenics into government policy and was much admired and mimicked by Hitler in Nazi Germany.
The Snopes trial was a publicity stunt cooked up by the ACLU to embarrass Southern biblical literalists. They contrived to have Snopes charged with the crime of teaching evolution as a ploy to promote their eugenicist ideology. Darrow was brought in as a prop lawyer because of his national reputation and agnostic views on religion.
The creationist/evolutionist debate should have been resolved with the universal rejection of eugenics after the holocaust and the discoveries of molecular biology and genomics in the ‘50s and ‘60s but deeply held beliefs about human origins are still in the process of evolving.
You are correct.
During this period, they also concealed the factual differences between apes (24 pair) and humans (23 pair) until governmental education made the admission of the truth moot.
The poet Edgar Lee Masters was a card playing buddy of Darrow’s. They spent a lot of time together, confided in each other.
When Masters’ marriage hit the skids, his wife retained Darrow as her lawyer. He knew everything to use against Masters.
That little episode speaks to the shark intellect of some lawyers. Whatever he did, it was not motivated by altruism.
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