COHEN AND WAR....Neocon military historian Eliot Cohen says he supported the Iraq war but now wishes he'd paid more attention to the incompetence of the people who proposed invading in the first place:

A pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" — the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war — as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg.

I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq — brave, honorable and committed though they were — would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless.

I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

Atrios responds with what seems like an odd comment to me:

There were many reasons to oppose this war (and few reasons to support it), but I find it rather odd that the reason which was probably the most derided at the time — the "this gang can't shoot straight" reason — appears to be the one which, over 2 years later, seems to be the most frequently cited "I should have known" reason.

There are two reasons this strikes me as off kilter. First — and I admit my memory might be faulty here — I don't think this was anything close to the "most derided" reason for opposing the war at the time. In fact, aside from a generic contention that George Bush was a dope, I don't recall liberals even making this argument other than occasionally. By far, the most common criticisms were principled variants of "it won't work" and "he's exaggerating/lying about the threat Saddam poses," and these in turn were the arguments that hawks disparaged as clueless and craven.

Second, it's worth noting that the Cohen argument is a bit of a fudge: it allows him to admit that he was wrong, thus gaining points as a non-hack, without having to come to grips with the fundamental belief system that drove his support for the war in the first place. That's awfully convenient.

I say this with some experience. When I changed my mind about the war shortly before it started, it was partly because I decided the Bush administration wasn't truly serious about democratization. This isn't quite the same as Cohen's competence argument, but it's close: it allowed me to change my mind without coming to grips with a more fundamental question: if Bush had been serious about democratization and had done everything right, would the war have been a good idea? That's the question that really matters.

Today I think not — although, to be honest, I'm still not quite 100% sure of that position. But that's the question people like Cohen need to address. Are they still convinced the neocon domino theory is correct and merely requires more competent execution? Or have they finally figured out that military invasion really isn't the ultimate answer to the problem of global terrorism?

THE HORROR IN LONDON

Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2005

So the bloody week of 7/7 should have made the G8 summit turn from pop star evangelism about saving Africa from itself to asking what the western powers can do about those hothouses now germinating anti-western violence, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan.

The Significance of the Scopes Trial

by Gary North
by Gary North

On July 10, 1925, the culturally most important trial in American history began: Tennessee vs. John Scopes. It was the first trial to be covered on the radio. Hundreds of reporters showed up in Dayton, Tennessee, from all over the world. The monkey trial became a media circus.

The trial ended on July 24. William Jennings Bryan died in Dayton on July 26. With this, the American fundamentalist movement went into political hibernation for half a century, coming out of its sleep fifty-one years later in the Ford-Carter Presidential race.

There is a great deal of confusion about the details of the trial, but not its fundamental point: the legitimacy of teaching Darwinism in tax-funded schools, kindergarten through high school. On this point, all sides agree: the trial was a showdown between Darwinism and fundamentalism.

What is not recognized is the far greater importance of the far more important underlying agreement, an agreement that had steadily increased for half a century by 1925 and still prevails: the legitimacy of tax-supported education.

What I write here is a summary of a lengthy, heavily footnoted chapter in my 1996 book, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. That book is on-line for free. So is the chapter: "Darwinism, Democracy, and the Public Schools."

THE ORIGINS

The origins of the trial are generally unknown. It was begun as a public relations stunt by a group of Dayton businessmen. They had heard of the challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) regarding a test case for the Tennessee law against teaching evolution in the public schools. They thought that if they could get someone in Dayton to confess to having taught evolution in the local high school, the town would get a lot of free publicity. We can hardly fault their assessment of the potential for free publicity – monetarily free, that is.

Scopes agreed to be the official victim. The irony is this: he was not sure that he had actually taught from the sections of the biology textbook that taught Darwinism. Had he been put on the witness stand and asked by the defense if he had taught evolution, he would have had to say he did not recall. He was never put on the stand.

Also forgotten is the content of the textbook in question. The Wikipedia encyclopedia entry has refreshed our memories. The textbook, like most evolution textbooks of the era, was committed to eugenics and a theory of racial superiority. The textbook declared:

". . . if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways of preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country." (pp. 263–265).

This was the wisdom of high school biology textbooks, circa 1925. The ACLU came to its defense. This information had to be brought to the children of Tennessee, the ACLU decided.

THE STRATEGY

The city's merchants did very well from the influx of media people who could not resist seeing William Jennings Bryan take on Clarence Darrow.

The ACLU's strategy was to lose the case, appeal it, get it confirmed at the appellate court level, and appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which they believed would overturn it. And why not? This was the Court that, two years later, determined that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a mentally retarded black woman, without her knowledge or consent that this was the operation being performed on her. While she had a daughter of normal intelligence, this had no bearing on the case in the joint opinion of eight of the nine members of the Court. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the Court's opinion: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Bryan offered to pay Scopes' fine. Both sides wanted conviction. Darrow threw the case. He told the jury it had to convict, which it promptly did.

The ACLU hit an iceberg. The Dayton decision was overturned by the appellate court on a legal technicality. The case could not reach the Supreme Court's docket. Sometimes judges are more clever than ACLU attorneys expect.

THE REAL CAUSE OF THE TRIAL

Beginning with the publication of his book, In His Image in 1921, Bryan began calling for state laws against the teaching of Darwinism in tax-funded schools. What is not widely understood was his motivation. It was ethical, not academic. Bryan understood what Darwin had written and what his cousin Francis Galton had written. Galton developed the "science" of eugenics. Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871) referred to Galton's book favorably. Also, Bryan could read the full title of Darwin's original book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Bryan was a populist. He was a radical. In terms of his political opinions, he was the most radical major party candidate for President in American history, i.e., further out on the fringes of political opinion compared with the views of his rivals. Clarence Darrow had no advantage with respect to championing far-left political causes.

Bryan had read what Darwin had written, and he was appalled. He recognized that a ruthless hostility to charity was the dark side of Darwinism. Had Darwin's theory been irrelevant, he said, it would have been harmless. Bryan wrote: "This hypothesis, however, does incalculable harm. It teaches that Christianity impairs the race physically. That was the first implication at which I revolted. It led me to review the doctrine and reject it entirely." In Chapter 4, Bryan went on the attack. He cited the notorious passage in Darwin's Descent of Man (1871):

He could have continued to quote from the passage until the end of the paragraph: "It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed" (p. 502). It is significant that Darwin at this point footnoted Galton's 1865 Macmillan's magazine article and his book, Hereditary Genius.

Beginning that year, Bryan began to campaign in favor of state laws against teaching evolution in tax-funded schools. He did not target universities. He knew better. That battle had been lost decades before. He targeted high schools. A dozen states had introduced such bills. Tennessee passed one.

The Establishment recognized the threat. It saw that its monopoly over the curriculum of the public schools was its single most important political lever. So did Bryan. Bryan was targeting the brain of the Beast. He had to be stopped.

Across America, newspapers and magazines of the intellectual classes began the attack. I survey this in my chapter, citing from them liberally – one of the few things liberal that I do. The invective was remarkable. They hated Bryan, and they hated his fundamentalist constituency even more.

Yet the Democrats had nominated his brother for Vice President less than a year earlier. His brother had developed the first political mailing list in history, and the Democrats wanted access to it.

Bryan wrote in a 1922 New York Times article (requested by the Times, so as to begin the attack in response):

This surely was a legitimate question, one which has yet to be answered in terms of a theory of strict academic neutrality. But Paxton Hibben, in his 1929 biography of Bryan (Introduction by Charles A. Beard), dismissed this argument as "a specious sort of logic. . . . [Tax-funded] schools, he reasoned, were the indirect creations of the mass of citizens. If this were true, those same citizens could control what was taught in them." If this were true: the subjunctive mood announced Paxton's rejection of Bryan's premise.

Bryan had to be stopped. They stopped him.

The most famous reporter at the trial was H. L. Mencken. That Mencken was drawn to Dayton like a moth to a flame is not surprising. He hated fundamentalism. He also loved a good show, which the trial proved to be. But there was something else. He was a dedicated follower of Nietzsche. In 1920, Mencken's translation of Nietzsche's 1895 book, The Antichrist, was published. Bryan had specifically targeted Nietzsche in In His Image. "Darwinism leads to a denial of God. Nietzsche carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion." Mencken was determined to get Bryan if he could.

Two months before the trial, Mencken approached Darrow to suggest that Darrow take the case. In a 2004 article posted on the University of Missouri (Kansas City) website, Douglas Linder describes this little-known background.

THE STAKES

Both sides accepted the legitimacy of the principle of tax-funded education. Both sides were determined to exercise power over the curriculum. But there was a fundamental difference in strategies. Bryan wanted a level playing field. The evolutionists wanted a monopoly. Bryan's defeat did not get the laws changed in the three states that had passed anti-evolution laws. It did get the issue sealed in a tomb for the rest of the country.

The evolutionists made it clear during the war on Bryan that democracy did not involve the transfer of authority over public school curriculums to political representatives of the people.

The New York Times (Feb. 2, 1922) ran an editorial that did not shy away from the implications for democracy posed by an anti-evolution bill before the Kentucky legislature. The Times repudiated democracy. It invoked the ever-popular flat-earth analogy. "Kentucky Rivals Illinois" began with an attack on someone in Illinois named Wilbur G. Voliva, who did believe in the flat earth. Next, it switched to Kentucky. "Stern reason totters on her seat when asked to realize that in this day and country people with powers to decide educational questions should hold and enunciate opinions such as these." To banish the teaching of evolution is the equivalent of banishing the teaching of the multiplication table.

Three days later, the Times followed with another editorial, appropriately titled, "Democracy and Evolution." It began: "It has been recently argued by a distinguished educational authority that the successes of education in the United States are due, in part at least, 'to its being kept in close and constant touch with the people themselves.' What is happening in Kentucky does not give support to this view." The Progressives' rhetoric of democracy was nowhere to be found in the Times' articles on Bryan and creationism, for the editors suspected that Bryan had the votes. For the Progressives, democracy was a tool of social change, not an unbreakable principle of civil government; a slogan, not a moral imperative. Though often cloaked in religious terms, democracy was merely a means to an end. What was this end? Control over other people's money and, if possible, the minds of their children.

In the Sunday supplement for February 5, John M. Clarke was given an opportunity to comment on the Kentucky case. He was the Director of the State Museum at Albany. His rhetoric returned to the important theme of the weakness of democracy in the face of ignorant voters. I cite the piece at length because readers are unlikely to have a copy of this article readily at hand, and when it comes to rhetoric, summaries rarely do justice to the power of words. It began:

The issue was democratic control over tax-funded education. Mr. Clark was against any such notion.

Here it was again: the flat earth. It has been a favorite rhetorical device used against biblical creationists for a long time. The claim that pre-Columbus medieval scholars regarded the earth as flat, it turns out, is entirely mythical – a myth fostered in modern times. Jeffrey Burton Russell, the distinguished medieval historian, has disposed of this beloved myth. The story was first promoted by American novelist Washington Irving. The modernists who have invoked this myth have not done their homework.

Because Bryan was a great believer in tax-funded education, he entered the fray as just one more politician trying to get his ideas fostered in the schools at the expense of other voters. He professed educational neutrality. His opponents professed science. He lost the case in the courtroom of public opinion.

THE AFTERMATH

Bryan won the case and lost the war. The international media buried him, as they had buried no other figure in his day. His death a few days later in Dayton sealed the burial.

A year later, liberals captured both the Northern Presbyterian Church and the Northern Baptists. Bryan had a leader in the Northern Presbyterian Church, running for moderator and barely losing in 1923. The tide turned in 1926. In the mainline denominations, the conservatives began to lose influence.

In a famous 1960 article in Church History, "The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935," Robert Handy dated the beginning of the decline in church membership from the Scopes trial. Handy taught at liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1980, Joel Carpenter wrote a very different article in the same journal: "Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism." He pointed out that Handy had confined his study to the mainline denominations. In 1926, he said, an increase in membership and church growth began in the independent fundamentalist and charismatic churches. The fundamentalists began to withdraw from the mainline churches. What Handy saw as decline, Carpenter saw as growth. Both phenomena began in response to the Scopes trial.

Fundamentalists began to withdraw from national politics and mainstream culture. The roaring twenties were not favorable times for fundamentalists. Their alliance with the Progressives began to break down. This alliance had gotten the eighteenth amendment passed. By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the fundamentalists had begun their Long March into the hinterlands. Only in the 1976 Presidential election did they begin to re-surface. In 1980, they came out in force for Reagan. Two events mark this transformation, neither of which receives any attention by historians: the "Washington for Jesus" rally in the spring of 1980 and the "National Affairs Briefing Conference" in Dallas in September.

CONCLUSION

The Scopes trial was a media circus. The play and movie that made it famous three decades later, Inherit the Wind, was an effective piece of propaganda. The website of the law school of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, offers a good introduction to the story of this trial. But this version has a hard time competing with the textbook versions and the documentaries.

The victors write the textbooks. These textbooks are not assigned in Bryan College, located in Dayton, Tennessee – or if they are, they are not believed.

There is no Darrow College.

 July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com