There is an overlooked source of darkness at the trial that is well worth bringing into the light, the very high-school biology textbook at issue in the trial, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology. Few have even heard of it. Even fewer have read it. I happen to run across a copy, of all places, at a local thrift store.
Simply put, the textbook which John Scopes was using was offensively racist and blatantly eugenic, and the racism and eugenics were both part and parcel of Hunter's presentation of Darwin's theory of evolution.
Hunter ranked the races according to how high each had reached on the evolutionary scale. There are "five races or varieties of man…the Ethiopian or Negro type…the Malay or brown race…the American Indian…the Mongolian or yellow race…and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America." [emphasis added] By implication, we can surmise who, for Hunter, was on the bottom.
Well, now. I don't remember that in the movie. Nor have we been made aware of Hunter's eugenic ruminations. "If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection."
For Hunter, not only genetic predispositions for diseases such as tuberculosis and epilepsy are handed on by careless human breeding, but also "feeble-mindedness" and "immorality." Since it would be "not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity," weeding out the unfit is part of good human husbandry. "The science of being well born is called eugenics."
For support, Hunter trotted out the notoriously bad breeders, the Jukes family, the matriarch of whom had "a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants," of which "33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded."
The eugenic moral was clear. "Hundreds of families such as those [Jukes] described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. The take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites."
Hunter then declared that "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 preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race."
All this from the most famous, but unread book, the book John Scopes used to teach biology, Hunter's A Civic Biology. This is what Scopes was teaching his students down at Dayton. So much for the forces of reason and light.
http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/television/television-wiker021602.shtmlSimply put, the textbook which John Scopes was using was offensively racist and blatantly eugenic, and the racism and eugenics were both part and parcel of Hunter's presentation of Darwin's theory of evolution.Oh, this was from the National Review! But this, in contrast to Lesie Carr's yammerings from the Socialist, er, Progressive Sociology Network, is quite correct. Hunter's A Civic Biology (publ 1915 IIRC), the text used by John Scopes, was indeed both racist and taught negative eugenics.
I've pointed out in several threads that there was indeed a revival of "scientific racism" just around this time (the 10's and 20'). This revival was pretty clearly (in my mind at least) associated with unprecidented levels of immigration at the time from poor Eastern European and Mediterranean countries into Western Europe and America.
But why did scientific racism need to be revived? Because evolution had undermined the classical "scientific racism" of the 18th and 19th Centuries! Again, you're giving the racists way too much credit in implicitly justifying their rationales. (Even if you do so selectively, and ignore the scientific racism that existed under the creationist paradigm before Darwin.)
Clearly it was the racism that was primary, and the scientific justifications that were secondary, and contrived.